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 While I was watching Veronica Guerin, starring Cate Blanchett, I kept imagining the movie it might have been before director Joel Schumacher and producer Jerry Bruckheimer got their hands on it. A great subject has been slicked up. Guerin was an Irish journalist who exposed high-level drug lords and whose murder at the age of 36 in 1996 made her a national hero and led to bolstered criminal laws. As might be expected, her story is heavily weighted toward blood and bullets; we never feel that we know this woman as anything but a crusader. She places herself and her family in terrible jeopardy and is shot in the leg as a warning, and yet all we really find out about her is that she can’t stop. Blanchett has the right white-hot intensity to play Guerin, and she is capable of showing fear as well as righteousness. But she’s never allowed to develop much subtlety or richness, because the filmmakers keep upping the mayhem. (One scene hits home: Her bloody face-to-face confrontation with Gerard McSorley’s drug kingpin.) A character as psychologically complex as Guerin—whose drive may not have been fully comprehensible even to herself—needs a lot of room to expand on screen. Schumacher and Bruckheimer box her in.
(1 hr. 36 mins.; R)
— PETER RAINER
Opens October 17
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