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By PHILIP BOOTHNewspaper reporter Veronica Guerin fearlessly pursued Dublin's toughest criminals for her stories, and this film captures the drama . . . and the melodrama.
Veronica Guerin, the journalist played by a typically intense Cate Blanchett, clearly gets her kicks putting the screws to the subjects of her criminal investigations. She relishes posing tough questions to the toughest of the tough in Dublin, including the city's most powerful, most brutal gangsters.
But there's a profound payoff. Crime dropped substantially in Dublin as a result of the stories the real-life Guerin penned for the Sunday Independent. Drug dealers were forced out of neighborhoods, and crime lords were carted off to jail. Laws were changed.
This is the second time Guerin's story has been told on film, and Veronica Guerin, directed by Joel Schumacher (Phone Booth, Bad Company), hews closer to the truth than When the Sky Falls (2000), which starred Joan Allen as a character loosely based on the reporter.
The new version of the real-life story, shot on location in Dublin, boasts a bigger budget and glitzier production. The performances, too, are terrific. Don't be surprised if Australian Blanchett and Irish actor Gerard McSorley, as a ferocious mobster, generate Oscar attention.
The film, after a prologue set in 1996, flashes back to 1994 where Guerin, semifamous for writing about church corruption and crime, has wearied of her recent, puffy assignments. After a visit to a shooting gallery where heroin needles are trampled underfoot and raccoon-eyed teenagers talk about their addictions, the reporter changes the focus of her work.
She presses old crime-news tipster John "The Coach" Traynor (Ciaran Hinds) for information. She knocks on the back doors of homes occupied by the most feared mobsters in town, including Martin "The General" Cahill (Gerry O'Brien) and John Gilligan (McSorley), a short, bad-tempered man ready and willing to inflict pain on his enemies.
The reporter - fearless, foolhardy or a little of both - survives a beating, a shooting, a bullet through the front window of her home and, most disturbing, a threat on the life of her young son. And yet she keeps probing. Her perseverance in the face of imminent danger to herself and her loved ones isn't adequately examined.
Schumacher's affection for melodrama also mars an otherwise taut, tense film. He loves to alternate scenes of domestic tranquility (Guerin, her husband and son) with scenes of violence. And he can't resist a big emotional wallop of an ending, going for tears with an overextended, operatic grand finale.
Veronica Guerin
Grade: B
Director: Joel Schumacher
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Brenda Fricker, Ciaran Hinds, Darragh Kelly, Laurence Kinlan, Gerard McSorley, Colin Farrell
Screenplay: Carol Doyle, Mary Agnes Donoghue
Rating: R; violence; profanity; sexual situations
Running time: 98 min.