Movie Nation

The newspaper treated as the villain in Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray’s warped, wingnut friendly movie, was no such thing. They were the first to report the fact that he could not have done it.

Go to the link if you want to see how.

https://www.ajc.com/news/local/torpy-large-ajc-wronged-richard-jewell-wow-what-you-don-know/ucwRJ1RSxzBDwA6gNV7pQK/

Quick show of hands, who among you got through “6 Underground,” I mean ALL the way through it?

Because I was ready to give up, ten minutes in. I may be a big Ryan Reynolds fan, but even I have my limits.

‘Absolute s–tshow,” as one wag in the cast declares.

And everybody knows, NOBODY stages a s—tshow like Michael Bay.

Bay goes so over-the-top for this $150 million action extravaganza, it’s like he’s making a parody of his entire career — mercifully “Transformer” free.

The opening gambit lays it all out here for us, the Bay trademarks stuffed into a car chase that goes on and on and on and…

It’s Alfas and Rollers, Ferraris and Beemers, Minis and megayachts, thousand dollar sunglasses and 20-grand suits, exotic locales and exotic underwear, supermodel hookers and Cover Girl secret agents in male wish-fulfillment fantasy sex scenes.

All of it cut into a blur of explosions, crashes, blood-bursts, heads exploding, bullets raining and all of it set to pop and rock music — a montage of mayhem and Muzak.

One-liners, some whispered, most shouted – “Never underestimate the power of a really nice suit.” “This is where you ask me if I’m afraid!” “Evil goes unpunished.”

That’s the premise, Reynolds as a billionaire inventor and adrenalin junky who pulls  together this “team” to see to it that the world’s a bit nicer without certain villainous humans in it. His “family” is a group of specialists with numbers, not names — “2 — C.I.A. Spook,” “3 — The Hitman.”

They fake their deaths (elaborately) and become “ghosts,” because “ghosts have one power above all others — to haunt the living, for what they’ve done.”

Dave Franco’s the driver in that excessive, glib and gory opening chase. Melanie Laurent is the “spook” having a bullet taken out of her by Adria Arjona in the backseat.  I forget her number.

Ben Hardy is “The Skywalker,” a parkour-practicing thief, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is the hitman, Corey Hawkins is the ex-military sniper recruited for The Big Mission.

That would be taking out a Middle Eastern dictator and yadda yadda yadda, who cares?

If you’re into Michael Bay, this is on a par with his lesser action comedies, even though Reynolds brought his “Deadpool” writers with him to the party.

He owes them. And you know what? That favor’s been REPAID, with a really crappy not-that-flip-and-funny screenplay.

“There is NOTHING else I’d rather be doing with my life!”

If you’re not into Bay, fast forward to the BIG STUNT/EFFECT in the final act if you’re not going to sit through the whole thing. It’s a doozy, more impressive than anything I can remember in a Michael Bay movie.

It took a lot to get through this, because I re-HEEEL-ly hated that stupid, talky, bloody and endless opening chase. I’ll cut it a teensy bit of slack for A) Ryan Reynolds and B) that really cool effect at the end.

But that’s it. Done with this. Unless it becomes a damned franchise.

Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout, bloody images and some sexual content.

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melanie Laurent, Dave Franco

Credits: Directed by Michael Bay, script by Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 2:08

Breathtakingly beautiful, poetic, soulful and chillingly topical, Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Place” searches for righteousness in a time when cruelty and evil are the popular will.

This dream fugue of a movie is three hour meditation on the bravery of conscientously objecting to the actions of one’s government and refusing to swear fealty to a leader when to do so would be a betrayal of yourself and your morality.

It’s a World War II allegory for our times, a lone Austrian refusing to “go along,” to “Heil Hitler” even though every Austrian around him insists on it. And it’s a love story, an all-consuming romance that cannot withstand the test that this moral choice forces Franz Jägerstätter to make.

Franz, played by August Diehl of “The Command” and “Allied” and “Inglourious Basterds,” is an Alpine farmer who, with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) has made a life in in their village, Radegund. It’s a gorgeous place, a world peopled by those content with lives of physical labor ruled only by the demands of each changing season.

They plow and plant, care for the cows, chickens and pigs, scythe the wheat in late summer and haul it to the waterwheel grist mill with their donkey.

Malick presents Radegund as a quiet pastoral idyll, living in harmony with nature, all but untouched by the modern world.

But it’s 1939. Hitler, we remember, has annexed his native Austria into the German Reich. And Austrians, especially the village mayor (Karl Markovics), are thrilled. He’s “broken our chains” “lifted the people” and made Austria great again.

Franz and Fani pay little mind to the beer-swilling pundits of village green. They’re too consumed with each other, their little girls and their work to pay it much mind. Then, the Reich invades Poland. And then Franz is drafted.

He details the training at a nearby ancient fortress in long, loving letters home. But as the recruits are indoctrinated by triumphalist documentary footage of the senseless, dehumanizing slaughter their cruel, amoral state and its twisted leader impose on Europe, Franz has attacks of conscience.

Fortunately, he’s sent home after training. But he’s made up his mind. He will not swear loyalty to this monster. He will not take part in this amoral horror. As France collapses, Fani, Franz and others in the village hope that the war is over and he won’t face the choice he’s already made his mind up about.

We know better.

I shrugged off Malick after the swooning, indulgent sentimentality of “Tree of Life.” His recent films “Song of Songs,” “Knight of Cups” and “To the Wonder” left me cold. But “A Hidden Place” is closer to the mark, a film that marries his style — dreamy, immersive images of nature and natural beauty — to a subject that suits it.

This is his most beautiful film since “A New World,” his most poetic since “The Thin Red Line.” “A Hidden Place” is a reminder that nobody’s movies are as pretty to look at as Malick’s. And that beauty is a vivid underpinning to the picture’s over-arching message.

How could anyone this attuned to this world possibly go along with the unnatural destruction, inhuman cruelty and slaughter of a state that has gone mad, led by hate-mongering demagogue?

The camera roams and hovers, hanging on the shoulders of characters — on a farm field, on a country lane, in a training facility or later, in a prison — as we hear and see snippets of conversation. Too much of it is in voice over, a Malick crutch. A lot of is couched in the language of soul-searching profundity.

“Don’t they know evil when they see it?”

“The whole world’s sick.”

“Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

“You can’t change the world. The world’s stronger.”

“No evil can happen to a good man.”

Fani is the more devout of the two, not puzzling over Franz’s choice, having the faith that God will intervene on the side of the righteous, trying to be resolute in the face of the awful consequences everybody involved knows are coming.

An interesting stylistic touch — voices are never raised as Franz and Fani debate and discuss this, and then involve a few neighbors of the same mind, and even the village priest. Faith is extolled and tested, but even The Catholic Church wants him to do what it does — just go along to get along, ride this whole Hitler thing out.

Once Franz’s decision becomes public, though, tempers flare, voices rise, shunning sets in and threats begin.

Dealing with military authority and The State has an altogether different tone. Most of the dialogue, save for the odd unsympathetic villager, is performed in English. German, in this film, is the language of authority, hate and cruelty.

We need only that moment Franz declines, in uniform, to swear an oath to Adolf to know what’s coming. If we’ve learned nothing else from World War II movies, it’s that sadism and savagery are best delivered in German.

And if America’s current political plight has taught us nothing else, it’s that resorting to violence is easier after we’ve become numb to the language of violence.

The performances are sympathetic, but for all the close-ups and efforts at absorbing us into these lives in this world, the characters remain remote, removed. There’s warmth but nothing that approached emotionally wrenching.

Malick, of course, takes his time getting us to this point. He’s an indulgent filmmaker, and as much as I appreciate the meditative rhythms of story, inner conflict, setting and consequences here, “A Hidden Life” is slow to the point of slack.

The picture’s so long it buries nice cameos by Matthias Schoenaerts, as a lawyer who calls this protest “madness” that “no one outside of this prison” will ever hear of, and the great German actor Bruno Ganz, famed for “Downfall” and a million Internet “Hitler” speech memes. Ganz plays an aged officer who sits in judgment of Franz’s “treason” to The Leader and his regime.

Still, it’s a lovely, immersive experience, a movie that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of conscience, the bravery of conscientous objecting and the realization of how what happened there could happen anywhere that people embrace ignorance and hate, and others either go along with them, or do nothing.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material including violent images.

Cast: August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Maria Simon, Matthias Schoenaerts and Bruno Ganz.

Credits: Written and directed by Terrance Malick. A Fox Searchlight release.’

Running time: 2:54

Love just LOVE that Imogen Poots. Even if there is no way that line will ever NOT be funny.

An actress who has made interesting choices ever since “V for Vendetta,” “Me and Orson Welles” and “28 Weeks Later” put her on the cinematic radar, the Great Brit uses her one last turn as a college coed to do a “statement” movie on horror and its incurable, genre-old desire to slaughter pretty young things like herself.

“Black Christmas” has a female empowerment “woke/revenge” subtext, making it a slap in the face to the “torture porn” decade of horror. Sorority girls, hunted on a college campus where this sort of thing may have been going on through time immemorial, turn the tables on their tormentors.

Great.

If only they’d get around to that a tad earlier. But no, we’ve got to have an hour of summary slaughter, a collection of the dullest, least sympathetic and most poorly set-up murders in the history of Dead Teenager Movies.

There’s time for a little cheesecake, the ladies of “Moo Kappa” dressing in Santa’s Little Helper mini-dresses to tease, taunt and blast a little truth-to-power to the jerks at “Deek,” Delta Kappa Epsilon. One suspects student activist Kris (Aleyse Shannon) is behind it. But Riley (Poots) is shoved into the skirt and into service as well.

Riley has history with the bro-iest of the frat bro fraternities. Riley accused the former president of the frat of attempting to roofie and rape her. Riley reported this and “nobody believed you.”

And now that she’s dissed them to their smug faces, that frat is going to be out for revenge.

And then there’s this professor and Hawthorne U. alumnus who teaches “the classics” to the student body, and “there’s a petition circulating to have me fired” for it. He’s played by “Princess Bride” and “Saw” vet Cary Elwes.

SOMEbody is already sending out boringly-threatening text messages supposedly from the “founder” of the college and its most infamous fraternity. As the school is 200 years old, you could see why the kids wouldn’t take that seriously.

But this texter or texters is stalking women while wearing a Grim Reaper cowl and mask, making text jokes about what a ham and a sorority girl have in common — “They both SQUEAL before they die!” Take heed, ladies. Something horrific is going down.

Or would be if “Black Christmas” wasn’t the worst-directed horror movie in recent memory. There is no suspense, no time allowed to summon up terror, no novelty to the killings. And those elements I mentioned that “set up” the story? They make for the most excruciatingly dull first hour, and nothing that follows can atone for that.

An icicle? Christmas tree lights? Seems to me those might have turned up in the seven earlier incarnations of this horror title.

Poots gamely tries to bring a little acting polish to a genre where perfect hair, smiles and cleavage have always been the priorities.
But actress-turned-director Sophia Takal, who co-wrote the script, cannot for the life of her figure out what’s scary and what isn’t. There isn’t a second of suspense in this, not one sorority bonding or sorority sisters bickering moment is believable.

The picture begins badly, attempting a tone-setting menstrual pad gag scene early on, a “diva cup” moment that falls so wincingly flat that you hope the actress who performs it doesn’t let her parents see it.

Yes, date rape is horrific. Not the worst idea to motivate a vengeance fantasy with. But somebody somewhere should have had a clue, early on, that there’s more to a horror film than saying how “woke” you’re being. Somebody should have seen this wasn’t scary and was never going to be scary without rewrites and a director with a feel for the medium, who realizes how to make murders chilling, horrific and empathetic.

When things go this wrong, even having Imogen Poots can’t save it.

Still funny, BTW.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, thematic content involving sexual assault, language, sexual material and drinking
Cast: Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue and Cary Elwes.

Credits: Directed by Sophia Takal, script by Sophia Takal and April Wolfe. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:32

It’s a mess. And Brendan Fraser stars in it. Eventually.

It takes a good, long while for Fraser, of late on the Hollywood “comeback trail” thanks to TV work in “The Affair” and “Trust,” to show up in the feature writing-directing debut of Rohit Karn Batra.

“Line of Descent” is a New Dehli crime family saga where rival siblings debate whether or not to “go legit” and abandon their “land mafia” business, or get into something else illegal. Gun running is an option, and that’s where Fraser’s sociopathic stoner Charu comes in. Eventually. He’s an Alaska native who listens to the sound of a round being chambered and declares, “That is gooooood metal. YEAH it is!”

But we’ve got to wait an hour before he arrives, hearing the patriarch of the Sinha mob family (Prem Chopra) gripe about the “pimps” and “dirty whores” all these “foreigners” who have flooded India are. He is soul-searching for a way to get out of the family business.

“Land mafia” is almost exactly what it sounds like. A developer covets a piece of urban real estate. Thugs, some of them cleaned up and reasonable-sounding, strong-arm the assorted home-owners to sell out…or else!

Old Man Sinha has remorse for this business, and fear that cops are closing in and the whole shooting match is about to fall in on them. “I want to die in peace,” he says, (in Hindi with English subtitles). “I am not s good man!”

He’s got three sons — the tough yet businesslike Prithvi (Ronit Roy), the thuggish and impulsive Siddharth (Neeraj Kabi) and the fey pretty boy son of the old man’s last, much younger wife, stepson Suraj (Ali Haji).  Succesion could be tricky.

As indeed it is, when the old man offs himself. A power struggle ensues.

Then there’s the cop (Abhay Deol) who has just moved to town, who is looking at adoption with his wife so that they can ensure their “Line of Descent.”

Random bar attacks, strategic assaults and schemes and counter-schemes to carry out hits, maybe pretending there’s a mob war going on, flesh out the film, and slow it down to a crawl. The brothers plot, form alliances and plot again.

And eventually, the charismatic Westerner/gun runner shows up reveling in “the stench that is our business” (the smell of dirty money) and hijacks the picture, such as it is.

Batra, as a first-time director, has a hard time distinguishing between what stories are important and what to trim. He can’t figure out, at times, that every minute detail of resaurant scenes does NOT need to show us a waiter being scolded to get to an assigned table. Random shots, almost random characters and inane dialogue abound.

Those lines, crafted in an “English was not the first language I learned” goofiness, can prompt head-scratching.

“You must navigate to the genesis that is Barat (the patriarch),” the cop is told. Barat’s the villain who “slowly architected the ‘land mafia.'”

Somebody “stabbed him in the heart with a steak knife!” Wait, there are steak knives in India, now? Stupor mundi. 

There is no point in having the adoption counselor intone “Every child deserves a good home,” nor is the police motto completely necessary for us to hear. “Your job is doing your duty. And your duty is doing what is right.”

The sturdy Indian cast do their best with this plodding material. But Fraser, on a busman’s holiday of sorts, is the one who vamps it up and seems to have the most fun with it. He affects a curious accent, brings a lot of energy to his scenes as Charu (Charlie, to Indian ears? Maybe?) seems to be playing one side against the other and is most impressed by the too-young/too-weak youngest brother.

“I am inspired by your bear-like confidence!”

It’s probably not fair, hiring an American, billing him high, and throwing a couple of unknown-in-the-west leads in there for nearly an hour of movie before “The Hollywood Star” shows up. But “Line of Descent” has balance issues, threads that it loses track of (the cop is second billed, I think, and utterly unnecessary).

It’s misshapen and clumsy, start to finish.  But at least SOMEbody got to travel a little and wear funny hair-dye, an odd accent and eye makeup in a foreign land.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Ronit Roy, Abhay Deol, Neeraj Kabi, Charlotte Poutrel, Anisha Victor and Brendan Fraser.

Credits: Written and directed by Rohit Karn Batra.  A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:44

A big 2020 release of a 2008 musical.

A World War II story about morality, not blindly plunging down the hole of doing whatever Dear Leader and his bigoted murderous minions say.

A very LONG WWII story, I should add.

Character studies are the chamber music of the cinema — intimate, uncluttered movies built upon carefully-observed and recreated details. They are movies unplugged, capturing small-scale tragedies or personal triumphs via layers of quiet reflection.

Not a lot happens in “Colewell,” a character study zeroed in on a village postmistress in tiny, aging Colewell in rural western Pennsylvania. You know what’s coming by the mere fact that I use “rural” and “postmistress” in the same sentence.

And Karen Allen, as Nora, the woman running that ancient, single-window gathering spot for mail, gossip, knitting and personal and community problem-solving, doesn’t give herself to big emotions or drama. Writer-director Tom Quinn lets her face tell her story, her eyes show her past, her dropped-hints reveal to us what she’s going through, who these people are to her and who our hitchhiking narrator is to all these folks “back home.”

Hannah Gross is that narrator, who tells stories through conversation where she lists what she’s picked up from her time with her thumb out.

“Life always seems the same length, no matter what age you are.” Times past and days ahead go on “forever–and not very long.”

That’s where Nora is when we meet her, a creature of decades of routine — clucking at her chickens, talking about her favorite “Rose” as she passes on coffee and a few eggs to postman Charles (Kevin J. O’Connor) before donning the blue uniform and making her way to “the office.”

She’s well-past 60, apparently widowed and living on the farm she used to share with her husband. Chickens are all she bothers with these days.

And then the letter comes telling her the USPS isn’t renewing her contract, that the local office is to be shuttered.

“Personal grievances regarding this transition must be kept private,” she’s ordered. But posting the notice gets the whole village up in arms — words like “legal recourse” and “heart of our community” are bandied about.

Nora? She can take a transfer or retirement.

“They think I’m old and I don’t have any fight left in me.”

Quinn’s elegiac film, the very definition of “a film festival movie” (rewarding, but with few commercial prospects), doesn’t deny the inevitable of such decisions. These cubbyhole post offices have been shuttering all over rural America for decades.

Quinn just follows the silent, reflective Nora as she cooks, tends her flock in the coop and listens to the now-grousing flock that comes to her window every day. Visiting a worn carving on a cliff face on her favorite hike gives up her past.

And signatures, who the mail is addressed to, connects her to the picture’s simple, sweet mystery.

Allen has long been an actress with perfectly expressive eyes, and wearing her years with grace has been a hallmark of her recent work. Yes, she gets to show Nora still has “some fight” left in her. No, Nora doesn’t come off as reasonable when she does.

But “Colewell” makes a lovely metaphor for the emptying-out corners of America, which can be lovely places few want to live in any more, their residents aging out of the mainstream of work and thought, watching their lives lose relevance, bit by “retiring” bit.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Karen Allen, Kevin J. O’Conner, Hannah Gross

Credits: Written and directed by Tom Quinn. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:19

“The Whistleblower” is a Sino-Aussie thriller with plenty of properly potent action beats, a generally engaging cast, a global chase involving wildly improbable escapes and a script rife with knee-slappingly silly plot details.

A tale of a global mineral megacompany covering up an environmental disaster, and thereby enabling disasters to come, it’s almost refreshing in the ways it wants to depict China as both innocent of the machinations of global capitalism, and a corrupt partner in it.

Lei Jiayin of “The Wandering Earth” plays Mark, the Chinese emigre who has made to the top of the executive ranks of the Aussie multinational GPEC despite the “Chinese glass ceiling.” Foreigners, he tells other Chinese characters in the story, don’t get to the very top of Australian firms, implying xenophobia.

Then he admits he never became a citizen and gives other hints as to where his true national loyalties lie and undercuts his own complaint.

Mark is unflashy, a plodder who gets stuff done, just the way his peers (John Batchelor among them) like it. His old school rival Peter (Wang Ce) is the flashy one, running the company’s underground coal gassification plant in Malawi, Africa.

Peter returns to a resort at Twelve Apostles (landmark Australian islets) to berate Mark publicly at a corporate retreat as someone whose “mind is never entirely on the job…Don’t be stupid! No mistakes!”

If it wasn’t for his supposed job security and the presence of an old flame, now married to the CEO of a Chinese firm about to partner with GPEC, Mark would be bummed. Siliang (Tang Wei of “Lust, Caution” and “Blackhat”) was his bey, back in the day. And on this night, they renew their acquaintance and their passion. No kissing, though.

She’s on a plane and gone in the AM, Mark heads home to the digital effects-creator wife (Qi Xi) and kid, and all is forgotten.

Only diabetic Peter has died in his sleep. That corporate jet Siliang and other honchos were on crashed. “What’s going on?” we wonder.

Not Mark. NoEven after Siliang calls him from a fleabag motel in the Melbourne red light district. Even after an assassin chases them into the night.

It takes Mark a LONG time to realize there’s something up with this company, his Aussie overlords, Siliang and her husband and that extract-gas-from-coal tech that we’ve seen cause a fiery earthquake in Africa in an early moment in the movie.

The reluctant couple, led by guilt-torn Mark, must traipse hither and yon to uncover the truth, recover her marital cash, expose the flaws in the technology and save the heavily-polluted (everybody wears filter-masks) coal-rich Chinese province of Lvhan from what happened in Malawi.

Mark’s wife? She is furious at Mark’s shame, which seems to be the biggest crime the movie truly wants to wrestle with.

They rely on “the best place to hide is a leaf in the forest” strategy — hiding out among sympathetic Chinese restaurateurs, friends and relatives in Australia’s Chinese diaspora.

The chases and escapes have their share of what I call “Bugs Bunny Physics” — leaning not just on insane coincidences, but humans and drones defying Laws of Motion and weight disproportions.

Some African scenes feature Africans with Australian accents (virtually all filming was done in Oz).

Money is a huge concern, and every corporate bribe and pay-off, every “Let’s stay under the radar” transaction that keeps the fleeing duo flush and enables their investigation, is paid for by check. See a flaw in that strategy? The writer-director didn’t.

The depiction of Chinese corruption, pollution and infidelity comes off as almost-refreshing, with so much of this film (in Chinese, with English subtitles, and occasionally in English with Chinese subtitles) funded and promoted as Chinese. Those are the sorts of things that have kept China’s greatest filmmakers and their more “honest” yet controversial works out of film festivals over the decades.

As I said, the action is fun. And the unintentional laughs from the plot lapses, check-writing and black-face — Did I mention how these two try to “pass” in Africa? — are almost worth devoting well-over two hours to “The Whistleblower.”

Almost.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Lei Jiayin, Tang Wei, Qi Xi, John Batchelor, Wang Ce.

Credits: Written and directed by Xue Xialu. A CMC release.

Running time: 2:14

Clint Eastwood cast his aged eyes upon America, the flood of indictments and prison sentences raining on a Russian puppet in the White House, the daily affronts to truth, decency, morality, legality and patriotism reported by the press, and decided now was the perfect time to make a movie attacking the F.B.I. and the media.

It’s not wholly unexpected for a movie star/director with clout who vented his politics in his movies during the Clinton years, who engaged in dubious battle with a chair on national TV to ridicule a president who didn’t share his ideology.

His “Richard Jewell” is a quasi-comical “Absence of Malice” remake and a defense of a guy rightly “investigated” by the Feds, who crossed the line from investigating to targeting the security guard who was the first person who found the pipe-bomb stuffed backpack in a park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And it’s a troublingly inaccurate account of the media circus that descended on this hapless hero briefly at the center of a terror case that riveted the world, which is what you get when “The World comes to Atlanta.”

Eastwood’s Jewell, played with sympathy and an unsophisticated native wit and integrity by Paul Walter Hauser, is rescued from the TV and print press stereotyping of the day and remembered as a fellow who wanted to be a cop so badly he immersed himself in the procedures and even the bomb-making arcana that made him literally “the right guy, in the right place at the right time.”

He may come off as a morbidly obese crank and a zealot who goes overboard as a campus security “rent-a-cop” in early scenes, as a starstruck fanboy who goes way above and beyond in cooperating with the F.B.I. (Jon Hamm) that is turning him from a national hero who saved lives into the focus of their suspicions. But he was clever enough to get his lawyer (Sam Rockwell, a hoot) in there, and fast.

Kathy Bates plays his overwhelmed mother, whom he lived with, perhaps another nail in the coffin of “he fits the profile” — a frustrated lone white male who wants to be perceived as a hero, even as he’s plotting his revenge on America.

And to her lasting shame, Olivia Wilde signed on to play an oversexed caricature of the admittedly imperfect Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter who first broke the news that Jewell was under suspicion, thanks to an F.B.I. leak that history says she DIDN’T sleep her way into, the “Absence of Malice” element to Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray’s bastardization of this “history.”

But the real “malice” here is the missing context, the refusal to focus on the victims, the panicked search for the killer or portraying the real bomber.

When you’ve got the time to slap an “I fear government more than I fear terrorism” bumper sticker on the wall of the lawyer’s office, shove in a joke about “organizations and associations” Jewell is asked if he belongs to — “You a member of the NRA?” “Is the NRA a terror group?” (Russian financed, inspiring violence and sowing national division? Yes it is.), you’ve got time to do this right.

That missing context is skipping past the Oklahoma City bombing, and its bombers, not bothering to profile, even briefly, right wing Atlanta bomber Eric Rudolph, to not even note how the F.B.I. was on high alert because Wing Nut America was in the middle of a militia-forming, bomb making, violence-threatening and government-attacking nervous breakdown because a Democrat was elected president.

With every Trump rally including crowd-interviews threatening “a new civil war” if Putin’s pick is removed from office, these are poisonous omissions. In an era of daily denials of fact, an “up is down” barrage of partisan hacks screaming conspiracy theories on TV when the facts point to their complicity, Eastwood turns himself into the cinema’s Lindsey Graham for “Richard Jewell.”

Clint, of course, gets Clinton footage in here, a dig at academic “elites” along with a final needle in the balloon of Tom Brokaw’s career (NBC covered the Olympics, and we see Brokaw, Couric and an actor playing Bryant Gumbel asking questions and repeating speculation).

It’s a film that moves in fits and starts. But I liked most of the performances, and was most interested in Rockwell’s attorney Watson Bryant, who brings some welcome moral outrage to the proceedings, and a sophistication and legal savvy that also fly in the face of how out of his depth this guy was, like his client. But bully for Clint, making a lawyer a hero, even if he storms into the newspaper newsroom to upbraid the “poor excuse for a reporter” who shone the spotlight on his client.

Did that happen. Nope. And there are plenty of places where we know Ray/Eastwood crossed the line that undercuts the credibility of the picture.

Jewell was a complicated man, who had plenty of red flags on his work and arrest record, a “get back into police work” agenda and a house full of guns. Of course they’d look at him. And if the press gets word of that in a story the whole world is competing over, it’s not going to be pretty.

But “Richard Jewell” doesn’t do the man, the tragedy, the case or the political climate that surrounded it then and now justice.

Eastwood’s made some bad movies in recent years, along with some gems. This is the first film of his I’ve seen since his orangutan co-star days that had me embarrassed for him.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and brief bloody images

Cast: Paul Walter Hauser, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell and Kathy Bates.

Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, script by Billy Ray. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:09