Interesting Isn't Good Enough
Director Rob Reiner and writer Joey Hartstone are back after less than a year since the release of their Woody Harrelson-starring LBJ with a new film about the run up to the Iraq War. Shock and Awe follows a team of journalists at Knight Ridder's Washington D.C. bureau as they uncover what appears to be the fabrication of proof that would justify an invasion of Iraq. Harrelson and James Marsden play the two principal reporters, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, while Tommy Lee Jones plays veteran war reporter Joe Galloway, and Reiner steps into the role of bureau chief John Walcott. Most of the actors, which also include Jessica Biel and Milla Jovovich, deliver fine performances, and Reiner proves a functional hand behind the camera, but Hartstone's script just doesn't live up to the potential of its subject matter.
Frankly, Shock and Awe is an emotionally inert experience. There's a subplot about a young man who decides to enlist that, though having its heart in the right place, feels shoe-horned in to a movie that has its mind elsewhere. As someone who ranged between the ages of seven and 10 when this film's story takes place, I know only the broad strokes of how 9/11 eventually turned into the War in Iraq. So to me, on a purely informational level, Shock and Awe delivers a perfunctory summary of that time (assuming the film has its facts straight). More interesting a focus is the responsibility of the press to the public to be careful about what they report.
Though there are plenty of parallels to be drawn between one lying administration and another, the failure of the media to responsibly deliver information is a more refined discussion to have at the center of this film. Again, this will speak to my age and lack of knowledge around this subject, but I had no idea so many prominent and trustworthy outlets were essentially selling the narrative the Bush administration needed to support a war. Outlets like The New York Times were failing to contextualize information given to them by the administration, ultimately misleading readers, something much of the media managed to do again during the 2016 election cycle—especially with a certain email server—and continues to do today when printing a false presidential statement without labeling it as such.
Despite this strong thematic core, Shock and Awe never feels particularly urgent. Though Reiner and Hartstone are clear with their characters' frustration at being the only sane operation in town, there's not enough attention paid to understanding why everyone else was getting it wrong. Even the Knight Ridder papers weren't keen on running these stories, yet that outrage is summed up in two rote scenes between Walcott and the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. There's just no fire in this movie's belly. Plenty of the performers sell their scenes, even when they're filled with dialogue that feels pitched more to the audience than to the other characters in the film, but making this story more about the war than about the press is a misstep.
At this point, no one needs to be convinced that the Iraq War was a bad idea that's destroyed thousands of lives. When Shock and Awe puts its focus in the right place, it still never finds its footing, let alone the eloquence of Reiner's earlier political films A Few Good Men and The American President (both scripted by Aaron Sorkin). What should be stirring or enraging is instead a lecture that managed to score some great actors for a staid dramatization. Reiner and Hartstone obviously felt strongly about delivering a timely story to modern audiences, however bluntly, so on that front, at least, they can say "Mission Accomplished."