4/10
Clint Eastwood has a thing for American nationalism, and it’s honestly no surprise considering he’s wet his hands into the murky waters of American politics for as long as before the turn of the decade. American Sniper, Sully: Miracle From The Hudson, were all a far cry from his other directorial like Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, and The Mule, and his latest entry, Richard Jewell falls into former category, which unfortunately is very much unrelatable to a Malaysian audience.
The story sets itself during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, whereby Richard (played by Paul Walter Hauser), who works as a security guard finds a bomb near the control tower of the festival grounds, reports it, and misdirects the explosion enough to avoid injuring the vast majority of attendees at the event.
While initially hailed as a hero, A writer by the name of Kathy Scruggs from the Atlanta Journal (played by Olivia Wilde) proceeds to butcher this image and perpetrates that he was the one who planted the bomb with leaked information from the FBI.
It’s already an incredibly difficult premise to create an interesting enough bait to watch, saved only by stellar performances of his lawyer, Watson Bryant (played by Sam Rockwell), and the regrettable actions of Kathy as she calculated the math herself that Richard could not have possibly placed the bomb then sprinted to make the phone call to inform 911 of his actions. A begrudgingly annoying portrayal that stirs up the anger of the audience means that Paul delivers his character in a very promising manner, though it’s hard not to be pissed at Jewell for constantly screwing up and stacking his case against the FBI investigation when all you want at the end is a cathartic release of the frustration faced by Jewell, his lawyer, and his mother.
And that’s the movie’s only saving grace. After building up the tension, the stress, the inherent frustrations of Bryant towards his client, Kathy’s subsequent realisation, the movie finally ends on a positive note, as the authorities capture the actual perpetrator (by the name of Eric Rudolph) six years after the events that took place.
The movie serves enough as a one time showing as a half-correct biopic if you were too lazy to read, but the devices serve to ramp up the drama and suspense on an otherwise boring, and often frustrating conduct of the law enforcement, but I suppose, that’s the whole point of the movie.
