I suppose it had to happen someday: With “State of Play,” the blogger thriller has arrived.
The improbability of the juxtaposition of those two nouns — yes, this is one of those movies that wants you to get excited when someone’s finger pauses over the enter button — is exceeded only by the improbability of pretty much every scene in the movie. “State of Play” is bordered by the states of absurdity and cliché.
Russell Crowe, who continues to get American accents about 53 percent right, plays Cal McAffrey, a whiskey-soaked reporter for a Washington newspaper tracking the mysterious murder of a pretty congressional aide. This crime is not as egregious as Crowe’s hair, which suggests there’s been a scalping over at Jimmy Page’s house.
The aide gets run over by a train in front of hundreds of witnesses, none of whom notices that she didn’t commit suicide (as the official story goes) but was pushed by an assassin. He’s one of those rare hit men who enjoys working with a large audience and security cameras everywhere. Later, Cal will figure the assassin must have been in the military (“probably special forces”) because he knew enough to shoot his victims in the head. Yep, could have learned his methods from the Green Berets. Or Netflix.
The dead girl and the congressman (Ben Affleck) she worked for had a secret: They were working on each other’s stimulus packages after hours. The paper’s blogger Della (Rachel McAdams) gets wind of the affair and is ordered to team up with the hostile Cal on the story, but she is less a character than a note from a studio exec (“get a blogger in there — the kids love bloggers!”). She spends most of the movie looking over Crowe’s shoulder. Occasionally, he tells her to call someone.
While the movie spins such oldies as the scene in which the witness gets rubbed out just as he’s about to emerge from a coma, everyone spends an hour piecing together what the audience figures out in the first 10 minutes — the congressman and his aide have ticked off an evil defense contractor that profits from fighting in Iraq.
Uncovering the details, Cal is menaced by a hit man who shows no interest in him except in one scene, during which he waits for lots of witnesses to appear before attacking. He then neglects to, say, kill the totally unprotected Cal with a long-
distance rifle while he’s walking to work. Later, this same marksman will miss a rifle shot from approximately three yards.
Helen Mirren (as the demanding editor), Jeff Daniels (as a suspiciously Christian congressman — you know he must be up to something when he complains that Cal uses the Lord’s name in vain) and Jason Bateman all check in, demonstrating the principle that when it comes to political thrillers, there are usually more characters than ticket buyers. Bateman plays a flamboyant bisexual publicist who refers to a garage as a “gay-rahj” and complains of a shady deal, “He wants me to fix it like one of my hairdryers!”
When he isn’t squeaking about the décor, he’s squealing about all the dirt he knows, endangering his business and maybe his life — all because Cal threatens to put his name in the paper.
The Blackwater-like firm, so evil that “they’ve got some interesting real estate — offices in the Watergate building,” has a secret plan to take over the country. Its lobbyists are about to win a contract giving it the right to shoot and spy on Americans. Even for a conspiracy movie, this plan sounds a bit far-fetched.
“State of Play” is equipped with a soundtrack, thrumming with feverish chords of intrigue, of the kind you no longer expect to hear anywhere but a sketch comedy show (or maybe a cheesy BBC drama, one of which inspired this film). Overbearing as it is, it isn’t loud enough to cover up lines like, “My God, Cal, we could have stopped this!” and “You’re the only real friend I got.” The prize for best worst line of the movie, though, should probably go to a description of the congressman’s penchant for three-way orgies: “That’s what he called ‘being in committee.’ “
STATE OF PLAY
Failed state.
Running time: 118 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, drug content, sex references, violence). At the Union Square, the Lincoln Square, the 72nd Street East, others.