Kill The Messenger movie review

After Webb’s story is published, and goes “viral”, the reactions he receives swing from wild adulation to amazingly quick condemnation. Rather than following up his story, he finds fellow media houses trying their hardest to discredit it, and given the resources thrown at keeping the CIA operations a secret, that’s not hard to do. As pressure and veiled threats build up, Webb’s own paper distances itself from him, admitting he may have “oversimplified” facts.

Renner is excellent as a man driven both by own secret ghosts to slay as well as a story he genuinely believes needs to be told, and later as a father and husband becoming increasingly desperate as things spin out of his control.

But there is a string of talented actors who make an appearance here, even if for fleeting seconds. The standouts are Sheen as a Washington politician who tried to do good too, and Garcia as a talkative Nicaraguan druglord dressed in linen who is so well ensconsced in prison that he uses the jail yard as personal golfing ground.

Based on books by both Webb himself (Dark Alliance) and by Nick Schou (Kill The Messenger), the film gives a more genuine idea of how governments work than if it had the CIA breathing fire down necks.

The pressures of newsrooms are depicted genuinely, as editors try to do a balancing act between Webb’s outbursts and the government’s calm defence.

Kill The Messenger is also a telling reminder of why most governments know they can get away with scandals of these kind. By the time a government report came out confirming Webb’s story, the film notes, it was lost in the excitement surrounding the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair.