Now available to watch at home after a brief theatrical run earlier in the year is Clint Eastwood’s ‘Richard Jewell’. This is the third of a trio of true stories that Eastwood has made in recent years that portray ordinary people doing heroic things. ‘Sully’ was excellent but ’15:17 to Paris’ was a disaster.
Paul Walter Hauser stars as Jewell, the security guard who found the bomb at the Atlanta Olympics and saved lives in the process but became the main suspect in the FBI investigation that followed. This is a smoothly made film, with the sequence showing the bomb being found up to it exploding nerve shredding. The performances are all excellent, including Sam Rockwell as Richard’s lawyer and Kathy Bates as his mother.
There has been a lot of criticism about the depiction of Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), a local newspaper journalist. In the film she is shown seducing an FBI agent (John Hamm) to get the story, an event that did not happen. That, however, is a very brief moment in the movie and it cannot be denied that the press who hounded Jewell were almost as incompetent as the FBI who fixated on him as a suspect based on profiling and despite having no evidence.
Despite my lingering unease that this plays a little into Trump’s playbook…fake news from mainstream media, a mistrust of the FBI, this is still a hugely impressive film from a man who will turn 90 at the end of May.
Rating: 8 out of 10
In ‘The Rhythm Section’, the talented Blake Lively stars as Stephanie Patrick, a woman who’s life has spiralled after her parents were killed in a plane crash. When she finds out that a bomb was placed on the plane, she decides to gain revenge.
This is competently enough made, and Lively is always good value. But in the wake of Atomic Blonde, Anna and Red Sparrow, amongst others, it feels way too familiar and Jude Law’s disgraced MI6 agent who trains Stephanie is a very cliched character.
About an hour in, things get livelier with some good action sequences but I’m not sure it was worth the wait.
Rating: 5.5 out of 10
Going straight to digital download is ‘Can You Keep a Secret?’. A young woman, Emma Corrigan (Alexandra Daddario), believing the plane she is on is about to crash, tells the stranger sitting next to her her darkest, most embarrassing, secrets. The following day she discovers that the stranger was Jack Harper (Tyler Hoechlin), the man who owns the company she works for.
This is a film that sticks rigidly to the romantic comedy plot template. A meet cute that brings two people together who fall for each other, only for one of them to mess up and cause a break up. They reconcile only for the other end to seemingly ruin the relationship before they again get back together and live happily ever after…
Nevertheless, this is watchable enough, there are some chuckles and Daddario shows her versatility once again.
Rating: 6 out of 10