…is not a good film. It’s a mess, pretty much a bad film–but part of me gives it small credit for being bad as a result of its ambition. The film recounts the story of three journalists who seek either to meet or actually capture an escaped war criminal from the Bosnian conflicts of the ’90s. It’s based on true events, an article from Esquire — and, frankly, the best thing about the dvd is that it includes the article and an interview with 2 of the journalists, and you can see the bleak wit and outrage that bubbles under the movie’s mash-up with various other generic conventions.
E.g., the film is:
–one of those stories about a cynical burned-out journalist (Richard Gere) who is revealed to actually care, and finds some sort of redemption;
–it’s a strange-buddy flick, with aforementioned cynic, realist/narrator Terence Howard (who’s quite good), and product-of-nepotism naif Jesse Eisenberg (who’s quite bad, but I blame the direction, which must have been “Be a bit more Woody”);
–it’s an outraged satire of wartime and postwar politics which exploit the violence and suffering of so many (and like many a failed satire, it reiterates such exploitations itself).
It’s got a voiceover, ostensibly to catch us up, but it’s simultaneously dully expository and ridiculously sketchy. I’d hoped that, if you’re going to give us voiceover, you at least spend some time giving context. But there’s little to nothing about the conflicts and violence there, no history–just the idea of a War Criminal, the plot-motivating fuel of “rapes” and “ethnic cleansing”. And given the film’s own righteous indignation about that violence, about ignorance (on the part of the young reporter) and apathy/neglect (on the part of the International Community), such absence seems worse than a fault, and more like a hypocritical shame. I guess I prefer its tonal confusion to the sleek “Tragedy” of so many Hollywood versions of genocidal conflicts, but a real let-down still.