Declawed and way too pleased with itself

Rating: 5/10 (7 March 2016)

The trailer makes the movie look spectacular - and the set-pieces on various film sets are indeed hilarious and masterful. The acting - wow - Scarlett Johannsen and Alden Ehrenreich especially are revelations as is George Clooney playing way against type, not for the first time for the Coens.
But the story - where to begin? It's a promising set up. Josh Brolin plays Eddie Mannix, a Hollywood studio's fixer that prevents the stars terrible life choices landing said studio in the reputational mire. But with a lucrative job offer to go to Lockheed Martin, we feel that Mannix will be okay regardless, so the stakes are really low for him, meaning we just don't care when Clooney is kidnapped by a Communist cell, it's just another day in his whacky life that he can jump ship from any time
At the beginning of the film, with Mannix embarking on his first fix that we see - stopping a starlet creating images the studio owns the copyright to - we initially feel in somewhat darker LA Confidential territory. I think if they had continued with this tone and really added impossible pressure on pressure to Mannix it could have really given something for him to divulge in those confessional scenes and been a huge - and hilarious - winner.
It's a crying shame that this amount of imagination and recreation of a Hollywood heyday isn't more compelling, funny and more illustrative of why we will always need Movies and Movie Stars.