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Veronica Guerin

*

Capsule-lenth Cinema Review - August 19, 2003

Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 18. USA/Ireland. 98 minutes. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Written by Mary Agnes Donoghue, Carol Doyle. Starring Cate Blanchett, Ciaran Hinds, Gerard McSorley, Alan Devine, Brenda Fricker.

Ah, sure it never ceases to amaze me how tha' feckin' Joel Schumacher can keep movin' between the brilliant and the shite. This is a movie in the same vain as "The Life of David Gale"; it's a big and glossy piece of crap that seems to be using the right tricks to get us teary-eyed, but hasn't got any heart.

How many movies are we going to have to sit through about Veronica Guerin, the Dublin journalist who chased the city's big drug pushers and ended up getting assassinated? In Ireland you can't go through any stretch of shops without seeing a book about her, and with this and "When the Sky Falls" (2000), there have been two major motion pictures. The death of Guerin was important because it shocked the nation into realising how far its evil barons would go; it also provoked a bunch of demonstrations, which led to constitutional reform that would ease prosecutions against organised crime. But all that is told to us in the last five minutes of the film -- the rest, like last time, is a bunch of pointless hero worship.

Joan Allen played Guerin before, and now it's Cate Blanchett's turn. I suppose it would be silly to actually cast an Irish actress. Blanchett says the word "scanger", just so we know everything is Authentically Irish, and we get a parade of manipulative shots of guys in leather jackets beating people up, or kids playing in streets that are littered with used-up skag needles. We're supposed to be horrified, and we're supposed to be amazed that Guerin has the guts to go and trade one-liners with criminals, but it's hard to concentrate on anything but the fakeness of it all. Every line either explains something in the plot or teaches us a little message. All the cops and politicians are dumber than this lone warrior reporter, and the crooks are all movie villains. And yes, just like last time, the main body of the movie never makes clear why these events were important or what the logistics of crime reporting are actually like.

COPYRIGHT© 2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani

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