In today's world of infotainment and dwindling newspaper sales, the idea of the vigilant, crusading journalist is all but gone. Newspapers can't afford the kind of long-form investigative reporting to crack the biggest stories, even if there were more than a handful of reporters interested in that kind of thing. To that end, Gary Webb was old school, a reporter who put on his walking shoes and exposed the connection between the CIA and the influx of cocaine into this country. For his trouble he was discredited by the government and shunned by trusted peers, and his story should make for a thoughtful, compelling story in Kill the Messenger.

Like the man himself, Renner's version of Webb is a dogged and determined muckraker for the San Jose Mercury News. "Dogged and determined" comes off as brash and arrogant to some people, though, and Webb always seemed like a big fish in a very small pond. He was like many reporters looking for that one big story. Renner looks nothing like the real-life Webb, not that he needs to, but there was clearly an attempt to make him "cooler", to look the part of a rebel reporter. Webb got his wish when he happened upon a story linking the CIA's arming of Contra rebels in Nicaragua and the U.S. cocaine boom of the '80s.

Where the film stumbles is in finding any deeper meaning in Webb's struggle, beyond showing how badly he got screwed in his pursuit of the truth. The film works considerably better as he's putting together the pieces of this gigantic puzzle, making for a cracking good political thriller in the process. Perhaps a shift in focus would have served screenwriter Peter Landesman better than this all-encompassing approach where we see Webb's unfortunate downfall. What's strange about it is Landesman, who wrote and directed the JFK assassination film Parkland, was a journalist who presumably knows the ins-and-outs of the trade, but he fails to include much of that in this story when it would have been beneficial. Shot economically and generically by Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave), the film never reaches beyond the familiar and certainly doesn't have the snap of Cuesta's Emmy-nominated episodes of Homeland.

Kill the Messenger deserves credit for teaching us a needed lesson on questioning authority, it's just unfortunate the film is hardly front page news.
Rating: 3 out of 5