The film revolves around a wide range of criminal events interspersed with dramatic situations and events begin when an American journalist reveals the dirty role of the CIA in the heroin trade to support the rebels in Nicaragua. But his life changes and turns upside down after the CIA learned and will Surrounded by many dangers.
The story of a crusading reporter's determined search for truth, "Kill The Messenger" gains its not-inconsiderable power by not being the kind of movie that particular description might lead you to expect.
The film doesn't demand that you now respect Webb or sing his praises, but it does ask you to look at the cracks in that tranquil façade, and to keep looking, no matter how much it seems to fracture.
It's oversold and under-reported. But Kill the Messenger flies high on Jeremy Renner's all-stops-out performance as 1990s-era journalist Gary Webb. Flaws aside, the film inspires a moral outrage that feels disconcertingly timely.
The script by former journalist Peter Landesman, who recently directed the medical drama Concussion, does a good job of simplifying a complex real-life chain of events.
It's sporadically gripping but ultimately rather frustrating fare, leaving us intrigued enough by the conspiracy-theory backstory to want hard documentary evidence rather than mere dramatic licence.
A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn't nearly as urgent as it needs to be.
Kill the Messenger does a credible if not dazzling job. In fact, the movie is a lot like the reporting that inspired it: a good introduction to a diabolically tangled tale.
