HOW TO BREAK A GOOD STORY
Rob Reiner’s filmography is full of riches: This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry’s motto has always been “What have you done for me lately?” and Reiner hasn’t done much of note.
Shock and Awe, his followup to the lacklustre 2016 biopic LBJ, is a disappointing All the President’s Men/spotlight treatment of the early-2000s War on Terror. Reiner most certainly didn’t learn his lesson from last time, rehiring LBJ screenwriter Joey Hartstone to pen one of the most telegraphed Hollywood scripts in recent memory.
Woody Harrelson and James Marsden play Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, the lone American journalists to question the White House’s fraudulent claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — used to justify war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. While the rest of America’s mainstream media parroted the simplistic rhetoric of top U.S. officials, Landay and Strobel’s boss at Knight Ridder, John Walcott (Reiner), recruits retired, grizzly, heavyweight journalist and Bronze Star Medal-winner Joseph L. Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones) to assist with their rogue coverage.
It’s a fascinating story when you consider that Landay and Strobel’s stories weren’t being picked up by most newspapers owned by Knight Ridder, because
their singular status made the information unbelievable, at a time when investigative journalism resembles an extinct profession. Though it carries the spirit of fighting for the values of the fourth estate, the film’s sanctimonious tone about the irreparable harm of that war dooms the dialogue and sinks the movie into parody-level entertainment.
This tone is evident from the get-go: a soldier’s (Luke Tennie) unctuous testimony at a veteran affairs committee introduces us to his tragic fate as a quadriplegic; he became a victim of an IED mere hours into his duty overseas, and he questions the necessity of war.
Elsewhere, Jessica Biel, playing girlfriend to Marsden’s Strobel, and Milla Jovovich, playing a wife to Harrelson’s Landay, support their partners’ efforts by questioning the logic of the government’s actions through heavy-handed monologues.
Perhaps the recent profusion of fake news has made it more difficult for some Hollywood liberal creatives, Reiner and Hartstone included, to write about the War on Terror with a more self-reflexive and objective lens — thereby ensuring that Shock and Awe fails to live up to its name.