Solid turns from Jonah Hill and James Franco, along with some disappointingly sidelined support from Felicity Jones, can’t save this muddled, real-life journo escapade from going the forgettable way of Kill the Messenger or Shattered Glass. Dropped from the New York Times for playing fast and loose with his facts, reporter Michael Finkel (Hill) becomes the confidante of Christian Longo (Franco) who is awaiting trial for the murder of his wife and children. As a fugitive, Longo had used Finkel’s name as an alias, but who is manipulating whom in their pre-trial chats? Unlike the infamous Joe McGinniss/Jeffrey MacDonald face-off savagely documented in Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer (the 1990 urtext to which all such stories aspire), the symbiotic relationship between Finkel and Longo is neither complex, intriguing, nor dramatic enough to turn this battle of personal demons into something more universal. The result is disappointingly televisual, the verdict wholly predictable.
