Uninspired and self-conscious performances from Jonah Hill and James Franco are part of what’s wrong with this exasperating and unenlightening film: it’s a dramatically unfocused, sluggishly paced real-life story, based on the curious, self-serving testimony of disgraced New York Times journalist Michael Finkel. Finkel (played by Hill) is shown getting fired for inventing parts of a story about the modern slave trade in Africa. The scandal makes him pretty well unemployable. Then he finds that a mass killer called Christian Longo (Franco) had taken his name and identity while on the run in Mexico, where he was finally arrested. Intrigued – and clearly seeing a career-resurrection, although that obvious reality is downplayed in this solemn drama – Finkel visits Longo while in prison, and develops a relationship with him. The significance of Longo using Finkel’s name is overplayed, the supposed bond between the two men is dramatically inert and the idea that Finkel has reached some kind of redemptive self-knowledge in realising how he has been manipulated is unconvincing. Rupert Goold, the brilliant stage director who did great work on the BBC’s Hollow Crown Shakespeare miniseries, is not well served by this material.
