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Friday, May 1, 2009
Movie Trailers / CL-TV Originals State of Play is crackling entertainment
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman on Fri, May 1, 2009 at 9:00 AM
By Matt Brunson
The inevitable American adaptation of the six-hour BBC-TV miniseries that aired back in 2003, State of Play is a movie that effectively operates on two levels. On one hand, it's the latest addition to the "conspiracy theory" sub-genre, a proud movie tradition that houses such dynamic entries as The Manchurian Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and The Constant Gardener. Yet on the other, it's a representative of the type of film that might eventually go the way of the dodo: the newspaper yarn.
As a thriller, State of Play is crackling entertainment, even if its pieces don't always fit together after all is said and done. Russell Crowe, in his best performance since A Beautiful Mind, stars as Cal McAffrey, an old-school news reporter for the Washington Globe. Once the roommate of rising Sen. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) back in their college years, Cal is disturbed when he learns that his friend's comely assistant, who died after falling in front of a subway car, was also his mistress, a fact that threatens to derail Collins' political career. The story is assigned to the paper's political blogger, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), while Cal is ordered to investigate a pair of late-night shootings that left one man dead and another in a coma. But once it turns out that both stories are tied together, Cal and Della pool their resources to research what eventually turns out to be a cover-up with far-reaching implications.
Read the rest of Matt's review here.
Watch the movie trailer here:
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