When it was announced that Paul Greengrass was making a movie called News of the World, I legitimately thought he was making a gritty, documentary-style expose of the demise of the British tabloid of the same name; a probe into the phone hacking scandal. Instead it turned out that he was making a Tom Hanks western. I was intrigued.
I really shouldn’t have been. News of the World is hamstrung by a dull, stodgy, cliche-ridden screenplay and pantomime villains. It also features the worst action sequences of any Paul Greengrass movie and is devoid of any excitement or tension. At best, it feels half-hearted; at worst it’s completely inept.
The story centers on Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, played by Tom Hanks, who goes from town to town with a handful of newspapers and tells the locals what’s going on in the world. He has all the showmanship of a blind, wet dog. If I went to one of these readings, I’d want my money back, such is the excruciating boredom of him relating local news in a tortuously slow and important manner.
Things pick up when Kidd stumbles upon a bloodbath in a forest. There he finds a young girl named Johana who only speaks Kiowa and German. He tries his best to arrange a safe passage home for her but no one can help. So it falls to him to take her home.
You can immediately guess what’s going to happen. They don’t speak the same language and the old man and the kid don’t like each other. He resents her and she’s scared and angry. So something terrible is going to happen, right? He’s going to abandon her in the desert or she’s going to slit his throat while he sleeps? Who am I kidding? Of course they’re not. They’re going to slowly bond and develop a long, lasting affection for one another and share each other’s cultures and become friends on Facebook and... Sorry, I’ve nodded off.
It might be an incredibly predictable trajectory for the movie, but the relationship between Kidd and Johana is actually by far the best thing in the movie. Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel are both excellent. Yes, this movie hardly stretches Hanks’s acting range but he’s still a marvelous actor. It’s just a crying shame that he has so little to work with.
The point at which I knew that this film was going to be a crushing failure was when Kidd and Johana encounter a gang of outlaws who want to buy the girl. The thought alone is terrible. We all know what the leering criminals want out of her and what they’ll do. So when Kidd and Johana skip town and a chase ensues, a tense, white knuckle thriller of a scene should follow, shouldn’t it?
It should, but it doesn’t. This paedo posse is populated by complete blithering morons. They trap Kidd and Johana atop a rocky hill and begin the most boring shoot out in modern times. There’s zero tension, zero excitement and zero intensity. The dialogue basically amounts to ‘Oooh, I’m gonna get you!’ And then we begin with the whole nonsense of ‘You can join us!’ Oh, will Kidd betray Johana and join the paedo posse? What do you think, dear reader?
The hilltop shootout also suffers the ignominy of having the worst effects shot since Legolas Greenleaf mounted a horse by levitating like a jerky clusterfuck of pixels in The Two Towers. Kidd crushes one of his foes by pushing a massive boulder down the hill. Pretty simple, eh? Shouldn’t be too difficult for the practical effects department. Instead, for some reason only known to the filmmakers, they decide to use a CGI boulder, and by god it looks terrible. Like Legolas it looks like it comes from a bad video game.
So this garbage shot takes place and then we still have to suffer the most boring game of cat and mouse in decades. Of course Kidd manages to kill the dunderhead but not before we’ve had a nap or two.
What makes this scene all the more bewildering is that we know that Greengrass is an excellent action director. The Bourne movies, United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July are all evidence of that. It’s like he’s consciously tried to get away from the ‘shaky cam’ tag but has failed to successfully adapt to a new style.
Once this sequence is over we almost immediately stumble upon more stupidity. Our heroes are riding along a path when some ne'er-do-wells emerge from the bushes. Apparently they’re a militia group who are looking to keep the area clear of outsiders. In reality, they just want to enslave the local population and amass wealth.
The leader of this group is so overwhelmingly narcissistic that he’s produced his own newspaper. This paper includes drawings of the leader doing all kinds of important things that he’s obviously never done, like curing leprosy and feeding orphans. They’re so cheesy that I half expected that one of the pictures would be of The Last Supper with the leader standing in for Jesus Christ.
The leader of this group gets Kidd to read this self-published rag to the local townsfolk. Kidd refuses and instead reads from another paper. The story he recounts is of a group of coal miners who turn against their harsh leader. Oh, I wonder what Captain Kidd is up to here?
The writing in this scene is so clunky and awkward that I felt sorry for Tom Hanks having to spew this claptrap. That this story could so quickly and effectively rile up this group of people is just preposterous. And would you believe it, but Kidd and Johanna use the commotion to escape from the militia, until of course the leader shows up as they try to mount their wagon. But after taking an age to shoot Captain Kidd (of course), the leader gets shot by Johanna. And then when another bad guy turns up to shoot Johanna, a kid shows up at the last second to save the day. It’s all so cliched and predictable that it almost makes you want to weep.
The kid who saves the day is a young man, and the actor who plays him is just awful. He has a weird, creepy vibe that makes you hope that he disappears quickly. And thankfully, he does.
Eventually Captain Kidd returns Johanna to her extended family. Her uncle, who is a complete asshole, is immediately whining and complaining and saying that she needs to work (get a job!). He’s only known her for ten seconds!
Of course the extended family treat Johanna like shit and of course Captain Kidd, after a tearful excursion to his wife's grave, eventually adopts her. And they go around reading the newspaper to everyone, and have an awesome time doing it. But the film is so poorly written and poorly constructed that I couldn’t give a crap. Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel do their best but no one could make this crap work. It’s such a disappointing film given the talent behind and in front of the camera.
