VERONICA GUERIN (2003)

I suppose action-specialist producer Jerry Bruckheimer could have found a director less well suited to this fact-based tale of a risk-taking, overconfident Irish journalist who battles the Dublin drug lords of the ‘90s than Joel Schumacher, but it’s hard to think of one.  With his usual trifecta of faults (coarse tone, clichéd response, co-opted tropes), Schumacher pushes too hard at both ends of the film, starting Veronica’s story with a nuclear family so happy, they dance their doubts away before she heads off alone down a dark alley with near masochistic longing.  Cate Blanchett’s Guerin a tricky character, a scandal-seeking reporter with her own ethical problems (she’s repeatedly led my the nose into printing single-sourced articles that play into power struggles among the drug kingpins), and so willfully foolhardy about safety, you wonder if she has a martyr complex.  Schumacher not unaware of the contradictions, but seemingly more interested in a makeup for Blanchett that turns her, distractingly, into a Princess Di facsimile.*  Weak as much of this is, there’s a dramatic pull to the facts and a typically elusive turn from Ciarán Hinds as Guerin’s inside frenemy contact.  His hulking features withstanding even Schumacher’s attempts at taming.

DOUBLE-BILL:  *Blanchett went from lookalike Diana to Katharine Hepburn in next year’s THE AVIATOR/’04, Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes whitewash.