Word: filmed
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...Crowe, 45, he's a tabloid scribe's dream, a paparazzo's enemy and the occasional hotel employee's worst nightmare. He's also the rare dramatic actor whose chameleonic intensity has lifted the quality of nearly every film he's been in, ever since Sharon Stone brought him to Hollywood for The Quick and the Dead in 1994. As a compromised cop in L.A. Confidential, a tobacco executive in The Insider, a wily negotiator with South American kidnappers in Proof of Lifeand so many more, Crowe has been able to erase his thuggish public persona the moment he steps...
...Slovenly, with long, stringy hair, and weirdly resembling the adult film star Ron Jeremy, Crowe disappears rather ostentatiously into the role; he's like a hedgehog trying to hide behind a Ping Pong ball. Affleck puts his stiff affability to handsome use, and McAdams reads all her lines correctly. The showy role - of a public-relations creep named Dominic Foy, a friend of the murdered woman and a pusher of questionable corporate agendas - goes to Jason Bateman. He's most entertaining, in a squirm-inducing way, but lacks the preening, queening elan of Mark Warren, the BBC's Dominic...
...movie's script is credited to three heavyweights, all veterans of political suspense film: Matthew Michael Carnahan, who wrote The Kingdom (G-men in a middle East war) and Lions for Lambs (handwringing over Afghanistan); Tony Gilroy, of Michael Clayton and Bourne movie fame; and Billy Ray, who did the magazine-corruption film Shattered Glass and the CIA exposé Breach. When a trio of top names is on a script, you can guess that each worked consecutively on the material, trying to slim it down or punch it up; and that each was employed to fix the "improvements...
...lent the enterprise pace and flair, and assured that each of the story's 20 or so major characters had a life of his or her own. (From State of Play Yates graduated to the Harry Potter franchise; he will have directed four of the final eight Potters.) The film's director, Kevin Macdonald, who did The Last King of Scotland, is not a flair fellow. The chase scenes interpolated into this version have no special oomph; the encounters no residual kick. Paging Ridley Scott? Oh, sorry, too late...
...there it is: another film that can't compete with a TV show. But I'm not turning in my movie-critic's license quite yet. If there's one thing I learned from both versions of State of Play, it's that a journalist never gives...