State of Play – 7

I was glad to read in reviews that the final plot twist made no sense, because that saved the many hours I could have spent trying to reconcile the ending with the action that preceded it. As it was, I attributed my confusion to the compression required in turning a 6-part BBC series into a 2-hour US flick. Plot aside, what we had was a slew of characters, some – Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams – intriguing, others – Ben Affleck and Helen Mirren – not. The newspaper-room setting was sadly elegiac in its echoes of All the President’s Men and other forebears: is this the last movie in which we will see a rumpled criminal reporter taking notes by hand, and a managing editor holding the presses for a scoop?