The story of former Fox News head honcho Roger Ailes and the epic downfall orchestrated by his female victims at the network is now the stuff of legend. What started off as just a single accusation from fired anchor Gretchen Carlson turned into a domino effect of Shakespearean proportions. All of this occurring during the thick of the 2016 election when candidate Donald Trump’s numbers were rising and Fox News had to juggle their loyalties to both Ailes and his female accusers.
Director Jay Roach’s “Bombshell” takes on these vivid events in sophomoric ways — filming and staring at the obvious, but never getting to the heart of the matter involved. It feels as generic as a TV movie, and only slightly improved by the excellent acting at hand.
Carlson (played by a very game Nicole Kidman) lawyers up right before she knows she’s about to get fired by Ailes (a hammy performance from John Lithgow in a fat suit), mostly for not conforming to the Fox agenda — shock, she has the chutzpah of having an anti-gun segment on her show. Meanwhile, other anchors, such as Megan Kelly (an almost unrecognizable Charlize Theron in the film’s best performance) have to juggle attacks from both sides of the aisle as she becomes the target of Trump’s ire via a multitude of tweets and the pressures that come with being a Fox anchor and having to defend Ailes publically. Meanwhile, Roach decides to add a fictional character in the form of Margot Robbie’s Kayla Popisil, the latest and last victim of Ailes’ sexual abuse and the connecting dots between Kelly and Carlson.
Roach juggles an innumerable amount of characters. There are actors here playing cameos roles ranging from Rudy Giuliani to Sean Hannity, but it all feels overstuffed rather than artfully rendered, derivative instead of authentic.
In fact, “Bombshell” feels more like a TV movie instead of an actual cinematic endeavor. And so, is it any surprise that Ailes’ headline-making story was already told this year on the small screen? Russell Crowe brilliantly played Ailes in the Showtime series “The Loudest Voice,“ which, it turns out, was the better screen version of Ailes’ story, as it stretched out over seven episodes to develop its characters fully and brought much more substance-driven and un-rushed Involvement to the drama.
What “Bombshell” does have going for it are three extraordinary performances from its main actresses; Kidman, Robbie and, especially, Theron are pros at this point and immaculately convey their characters’ intentions. The fault, rather, lies in Roach’s HBO-inspired direction (he directed the political dramas “Recount,” ”Game Change” and ”All the Way” for the network) and Charles Randolph’s hammy screenplay.
“Television is a visual medium,” Ailes quips at one point in the film, a tongue-in-cheek reference to justify the continuous leering of his female staff’s bodies, but he may as well be talking about the unabashed and needlessly over-stylized TV movie Roach has given us. [C+]
A US theatrical rollout is starting Sept. 30 in NYC, will expand to Los Angeles and other markets on Oct. 9 and then roll out nationally via a plan that forgoes selling the film to a studio or independent distributor.