Bombshell - Review Thread

The movie was a bit too bubblegum to be as impactful as I think they wanted it to be, but the performances were dynamite. Lithgow should get a supporting nod, because he was on fire in this movie.

Good movie overall.

"To get ahead you have to give a little head."

Show that loyalty, Nevs.

I don't need Sandler to win, I need Phoenix to lose.

Not a fan of his performance in Joker.

(I'm not actually rooting for Sander. Driver, Leo, or De Niro please. Or Brad Pitt in Ad Astra but that ain't happening).

Bombshell(12/21/2019)

Director Jay Roach has had a strange little career where he began as a maker of commercial star vehicle comedies like the Austin Powers movies and the Meet the Parents movies and then transitioned into making serviceable but not overly inspired political docudramas like Recount and Game Change for HBO but he’s had less luck bringing that side of his career to the big screen. His most high profile political film for theaters is his latest film Bombshell, which details the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News and how it came to be national prominence before the advent of #MeToo. Roach’s political movies have always been pretty effective at making famous people look and sound like political figures from the recent past and this is not really an exception. Charlize Theron certainly looks a lot like Megyn Kelly (though I’m not sure she sounds quite right) and Nicole Kidman looks a lot like Gretchen Carlson and the film is generally populated by a strong cast of supporting players portraying other side personalities. The film also seems to recreate the Fox Newsroom plausibly and the script is generally written with a requisite degree of wit and clarity. People looking for another of Jay Roach’s HBO productions should be satisfied on that level, but this is a theatrical film and it never quite achieves that cinematic quality which would elevate it beyond that.

However, I think the bigger problem with this is that it’s a movie that requires its viewer to sympathize with Fox News anchors on some level and view them as remotely admirable people, and that is something that I don’t think I’m entirely capable of. Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson are in fact terrible people. They knowingly worked for and helped advance a propaganda outlet that has coarsened out political discourse and has spread untold chaos and suffering across the country. Now let me be entirely clear, I am not in any way saying that this means they deserved to be sexually harassed, but there is something galling about people who spend their days advocating for hatred against people of color, immigrants, the LGBT community, and women who don’t work for Fox News suddenly deciding to care about this toxicity when it hurts them personally. There are ways a movie about this topic could have reckoned with that that and found ways to explore this conflict, but this movie never really finds a way to do that and can’t really find a way to make these people feel like anything other than heroic whistleblowers. If that doesn’t bother you, then this is a passable movie with reasonably good production values, but it does bother me.

**1/2 out of Five