Excellent Foxx, good Downey, lame direction (Wright)

Rating: Null/10 (2 September 2011)

I was curious to see why was this film a distinctive looser among otherwise excellent Wright's films. It's hard to guess how and why it happened (the crack in L.A.'s air maybe? :-) but he completely lost any sense of pacing, building up and maintaining the momentum. Kind of as if he was doing a documentary instead of a feature with a sizable budget. One even has to wonder where on earth did all that money go?
Part of the problem is the script that was way too much burdened by trying to be "true to life" of actual Steve Lopez which is rather boring. Actual Lopez just talks/writes drivel on and on and on and it's natural to him since he's a journalist. A dramatist needs to have the sense of building up a momentum and making characters more intense and colorful than they are in real life or the audience falls a sleep.
So the principal fault of Joe Wright as a director was that he didn't tear a lame script to shreds but followed it and even worse go influenced by it and made the film even more flat, slow and boring. If doesn't help to have one Jamie Foxx who can deliver as much intensity as you'd let him when you don't let him. It doesn't help to have Robert Downey when you force him to be a talking head. It doesn't help to have an ex wife as a figurehead when you don't develop some juice and intensity without being self-conscious about whether actual Lopez had some juice with his ex or not.
Full feature film is not a documentary and fails every time it tries to be. That's the principal rule that Joe Wright forgot while making this film and Foxx and Downey bailed him out only to a degree to which they were allowed to. It also looks like Catherine Keener was ready and willing to do much juicier ex wife but also wasn't allowed to.