Review: Kill the Messenger
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
A period thriller outlining the triumph, and then swift smearing, of controversial journalist Gary Webb.
City Paper grade: C
A period thriller outlining the triumph and swift smearing of controversial journalist Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger is blessed with a rich starting point, stocked with enough historical cojones and front-end intrigue to entice even the most casual conspiracy theorist. But as much as Michael Cuesta wants to sell his film as the definitive defense of Webb’s work, he’s saddled by the same shortcomings as his subject, struggling to find a balance between the cinematic and the academic.
Jeremy Renner has always come off a little too poised to play the haggard, haunted roles he pulls so often, but he seems to understand Webb, a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who watched as his greatest professional accomplishment destroyed his career. In 1996, Webb’s paper published “Dark Alliance,” an incendiary investigative account linking CIA money with the Nicaraguan contra forces responsible for introducing crack cocaine to inner-city America. The impact of the story, aided by the Internet in its infancy, won Webb immense praise, then instant blowback, as government suits distanced themselves and jealous competitors locked in on discrediting the writer’s findings.
Cuesta, adapting Nick Schou’s biography of the same name, starts by digging into Webb’s hardscrabble process, beginning with a tip from the wife of a jammed-up drug lord that sends him scurrying between California and Central America sewing up sources. Maintaining an early pace that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Renner’s Bourne installments keeps initial interest high, but the running is slowed by a logical foe — the fact that reporting, especially the writing part, is workmanly at best and monastic at worst. Glamorizing everything around it doesn’t automatically make it friendlier to shoot.
In a more abstract sense, Kill the Messenger fails to highlight Webb’s importance to the profession because it tries too hard to prove he was faultless. The writer, who died under suspicious circumstances in 2004, has been praised as a journalistic genius and vilified as a gunner with a deadly agenda. His former colleagues have come out to explain that neither is accurate, but Cuesta is too occupied with righteous vindication to breathe deep and buy that.
