The history of America’s “War on Drugs” has produced many stories. One of the lesser-known ones is that of the late Gary Webb, an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News who wrote a series of articles about the CIA’s involvement in cocaine trafficking into the United States. The film Kill the Messenger tries to tell the story of Webb and the backlash he faced because of his writing. Unfortunately, despite some good performances, the film falls short of its lofty ambitions.
In terms of the cast, the star of the show is Jeremy Renner as Webb. Renner is obviously a very talented actor, but since he really came to prominence in The Hurt Locker (2009), he’s mostly been doing either supporting work or action films, neither of which give him much chance to really show what he can do. He does a great job of showing the immense toll that the events playing out take on Webb. But the fact that Renner’s facial hair makes him look like a younger Sean Penn is a bit distracting at times. Barry Pepper and Mary Elizabeth Winstead do solid supporting work as, respectively, Russell Dodson and Anna Simons, Webb’s superiors at the San Jose Mercury News. Watching the film, I felt so sorry for Rosemarie DeWitt, who has the thankless role of Susan Webb, Gary’s wife. DeWitt is a talented actress, but I cringed at her having to deliver the disapproving wife “can’t you see you’re tearing this family apart?” lines. The film also has small supporting turns from a number of notable actors, including Ray Liotta, Oliver Platt, Michael Sheen, Richard Schiff, Andy Garcia, Robert Patrick, and Tim Blake Nelson. Without doubt, my favorite of these bit characters is Michael K. Williams as “Freeway” Rick Ross, the convicted drug trafficker who presided over a cocaine empire in Los Angeles in the early-to-mid-1980s. Williams, best known as Omar Little on the HBO series The Wire, absolutely owns the screen when he’s around, and I could have watched an entire movie based on his character.
Jeremy Renner in “Kill the Messenger.” Photo by Chuck Zlotnick – © 2013 – Focus Features LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The film’s story is the source of both its greatest strength and weakness. The scenes of Webb’s obsessive search for the truth are much more interesting than his family issues, which just felt like they had been manufactured for the film out of some perceived need for a human interest angle. If the domestic part of the story had been reduced, the entire movie would have been stronger. The film also suffers from noticeable pacing and editing issues. The second act of the film starts to drag after a while, with what feels like scene after scene of people questioning Webb’s story and him doggedly insisting that he’s right. And then the movie just kind of ends, with the rather critical information of what ended up happening to Gary Webb delivered via onscreen text. Ultimately, this story would have been much better served by either an in-depth documentary about Webb, or a film from someone like Oliver Stone who would really sink his teeth into this material.
As I’ve written before, the hardest type of movie to review is one that’s simply middle-of-the-road. Kill the Messenger is never terrible, but it also never achieves greatness. It boasts a talented cast and a great central performance from Jeremy Renner, but the flawed storytelling drags the entire film down. The story of Gary Webb is one that deserves to be told, but Kill the Messenger is not the movie to do that job.
Timothy Monforton