Jeremy Renner To Star In True Story Thriller 'Kill The Messenger'

[Akijama]

The movie packages are coming together on the eve of next week’s Berlin Film Market. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters star Jeremy Renner has been set to star in Kill The Messenger, a thriller that Michael Cuesta will direct that is based on the tragic tale of a journalist who committed suicide after being smeared by the CIA. The script was written by Peter Landesman. Cuesta seems perfect for this; he’s an exec producer and has directed numerous episodes of Homeland abd has been integral in establishing the visual look of that show. He also helmed the pilots for Dexter and Elementary.

Scott Stuber, who set up this project eight years as producer at Universal, will be joined by Renner and Don Handfield and it will be a co-production between Stuber’s Bluegrass and Renner’s The Combine. Naomi Despres is also producing. The film begins production in the summer.

This is a project that has been in the works for several years, and most recently it had been at Universal with Stuber. If the CIA mostly wears a white hat in Zero Dark Thirty for its dogged efforts to track and kill Osama Bin Laden, the agency wears a decidedly black lid here. Kill The Messenger is based on the true story of Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News reporter who committed suicide after being the target of a smear campaign when he linked the CIA to a scheme to arm Contra rebels in Nicaragua and import cocaine into California.

Landesman (who is right now making his directorial debut on the JFK assassination pic Parkland) put the script together with source material from two books: Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, by Webb, and Nick Schou’s Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb.

After he published his 1996 three-part series Dark Alliance, and implied that the CIA was a catalyst for the crack cocaine scourge in California, Webb was excoriated by colleagues in the press. The film will posit that Webb was mostly right, and that the CIA sought to smear him to conceal a scandal. The agency, in essence, concealed a deal with the devil that it made for what was believed at the time to be for the greater good. As a result of the smear campaign, Webb was destroyed; what should have been a careermaking expose turned out to be a career ending debacle. Webb was jobless and in a spiral of depression when he ended his life in 2004.

CAA, which represents Renner and Stuber, will co-represent the film’s domestic distribution rights with WME, which represents Cuesta. The agencies will bring the project to Berlin. Renner is managed by Untitled’s Beth Holden.

Renner next stars in the Abscam drama that David O Russell is directing with Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper.

http://www.deadline.com/2013/01/jere...rno-gary-webb/

[MikeScott]

KILL THE MESSENGER - Official Trailer (2014) [HD] Jeremy Renner - YouTube

Looks really great! Very nice cast.

[Foggy]

That looks really good, shot up to the top of my must watch list.

[jwerk]

Unfortunately, I've never heard about Webb or his story, but the trailer looks really good.

According to Wikipedia, he died of 2 gunshot wounds to the head which has been ruled a suicide

[Jasonic]

This was really good. It definitely lacks that extra bite to it, but it's solid all the way around, and with a great cast.

My short review

A solid political thriller on the back of a solid performance by Jeremy Renner. Definitely the type of political thriller I go for. Ones that try and dissect bureaucracy, rather than try to shove a political message. The cinematography may be nothing to gawk over, but it paints an intimate picture that sits right at home with the genre without trying to feel overtly bigger than it is. I'm a big fan of Renner, and he definitely gives it his all, but I don't see Oscar nod on the horizon this time around. The category is always too competitive, and there's not a whole lot here that's showing us something new. But he definitely shows us that he will continually be up for the ride with better roles, and hasn't just turned in to your standard blockbuster star. Kill the Messenger, while engaging to anyone interested in it's swing, does lack that extra punch that places it among the top notch of it's genre. It just doesn't have as much bite as you would hope for. Still really good though, and with a great cast.

[Monterey Jack]

MEW is in it.

[AaronJ]

This makes me think of a conversation I was having earlier today at the salon. The woman doing my mani/pedi (shut-up -- it's relaxing) and I were talking a lot about movies and TV. And I said, and she agreed, that it seems like everything that Renner is in is good.

Now, granted, I haven't seen everything he's been in. Far from it. But I can't remember the last thing I saw with him where I went, "Well, that sucked."

[Mandalorian]

Originally Posted by AaronJ

This makes me think of a conversation I was having earlier today at the salon. The woman doing my mani/pedi (shut-up -- it's relaxing) and I were talking a lot about movies and TV. And I said, and she agreed, that it seems like everything that Renner is in is good.

Now, granted, I haven't seen everything he's been in. Far from it. But I can't remember the last thing I saw with him where I went, "Well, that sucked."

Good point. Even his low points (The Bourne Legacy) are decent. I, for one, am really looking forward to this, despite its middling reception. I haven't seen Hantzel and Gretel yet.

[jabbercash]

Originally Posted by Mandalorian

Good point. Even his low points (The Bourne Legacy) are decent. I, for one, am really looking forward to this, despite its middling reception. I haven't seen Hantzel and Gretel yet.

I'm going to have to agree, one of my favorite actors.

[AaronJ]

Originally Posted by Mandalorian

Good point. Even his low points (The Bourne Legacy) are decent. I, for one, am really looking forward to this, despite its middling reception. I haven't seen Hantzel and Gretel yet.

I haven't either, but I've heard it's fun if a bit silly.

Plus ... Gemma. Tough to argue with her.

[Astro Zombie]

Originally Posted by AaronJ

I haven't either, but I've heard it's fun if a bit silly.

Plus ... Gemma. Tough to argue with her.

It's pretty damn fun.

[AaronJ]

Originally Posted by Astro Zombie

It's pretty damn fun.

If I'm still awake/sober after LPGA golf ends at 3am this morning, I'll check it out. I'm pretty sure it's still on Netflix.

[Mandalorian]

Originally Posted by AaronJ

If I'm still awake/sober after LPGA golf ends at 3am this morning, I'll check it out. I'm pretty sure it's still on Netflix.

I know it's on Amazon Prime. I want to see the unrated cut though.

[AaronJ]

Originally Posted by Mandalorian

I know it's on Amazon Prime. I want to see the unrated cut though.

Just checked Netflix, and they have it. It doesn't look like the unrated cut though.

[Holmes]

In the mid-1990s, the late Gary Webb, an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, published an ultra-provocative article drawing a complicit line from the United States government under Ronald Reagan to drug cartels in Nicaragua. Conversation and praise rapidly turned to stigmatization and threats as the government and other newspapers discredited and undermined his reporting, resulting in tragedy and, later, melancholy and overdue vindication. His story is dramatized in Kill the Messenger, a solidly old-fashioned and riveting journalistic suspense film. With its love of shorthand notes, imploring phone calls, and pavement-pounding media diligence, it could be described as in the tradition of the great All the President's Men, yet it does not build from the opaque to the triumphant the way the Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein picture does. In fact, it goes in the other direction, chronicling the cruel and undeserved dismantling of a gifted reporter's hard-won deductive achievement. It is a crusading-newspaperman film, to be sure, but a deeply sad and often infuriating one.

Portraying Webb, a game Jeremy Renner delivers the finest performance of his career to date. The film rests on his shoulders—the anxious hand-held camera is nearly always extremely close to him—and as bombast and truth-and-justice ferocity give way to paranoia and spiritual deflation, his portrayal of a man in decline rings true to an almost painful degree. He demolishes a third-act speech in which an exhausted, yet still quietly defiant Webb reflects on his career and ideals before an informal jury of his peers, cementing the power of an Oscar-worthy turn. Aiding him is an extensive ensemble cast overflowing with colorful character actors and welcome faces; the best may be Michael Sheen as a well-intentioned, but cynical and hardened Washington, D.C. veteran who tries and fails to warn Webb of the sensational character-assassination tactics employed to distract people from far more urgent questions.

A-

[AaronJ]

Wow. If your review is on the mark, Holmes, and they pretty much always are, this sounds amazing.

Thanks.

[MikeScott]

This was fantastic and underrated. Jeremy Renner is great, as is the stellar supporting cast. A fascinating story.

9/10 (A-)

[wormraper]

Originally Posted by jwerk

Unfortunately, I've never heard about Webb or his story, but the trailer looks really good.

According to Wikipedia, he died of 2 gunshot wounds to the head which has been ruled a suicide

the 1st gunshot wound was a shot through the cheek and jaw... he was probably shakey and missed that first shot... finished it up with the killing blow... actually not uncommon. My mother worked in the emergency ward during the 70s and 80s as an RN and she said it happened with gunshot suicides more often than you think

as for the movie... "meh" .... Renner does a solid job, but the movie obviously tries to Lionize Webb, and if you actually do research into WHY he was discredited.... you'll understand the reason. almost none of his sources held up.