THE PAPERBOY

Photos courtesy of Millennium Entertainment

The dirty south is an understatement in writer-director Lee Daniels latest, THE PAPERBOY.  

The PRECIOUS writer-director is back with a slice of film noir centered around the murder of a racist sheriff in the hot and steamy southern dregs of Florida in the 1960’s.  John Cusak’s slimy Hillary Van Wetter stands trial for the murder, while the writing tandem of Matthew McConaughey and David Oyelowe as Ward and Yardley attempt to find out if Hillary is really the culprit or an otherwise hot-headed and scummy heathen.  

Assisting the journalistic duo are Charlotte Bliss, played by Nicole Kidman, a sexual pen pal of Hillary’s, and a means to an end for Ward and Yardley.  Also along for the ride is Ward’s younger brother Jack, played by Zac Efron, a naïve young man who pines for Charlotte without understanding the complications that are involved.  

As he did with PRECIOUS, writer-director Lee Daniels magnifies with THE PAPERBOY.  Daniels is a man of excess, gratuity and a heavy hand, seemingly incapable of delivering a message or fable without a barrage of sex, violence and other unworldly human events.  

If like me, watching one character try to crush another with a tube TV-set in PRECIOUS wasn’t enough, you won’t find any consolation in watching the antics of Kidman’s sex-pot Charlotte rip off her clothes in jail or urinate on another character.  

These actions are off-putting on their own, but the effectiveness of the actors in these morally bankrupt and incendiary roles makes THE PAPERBOY void of anything artistic and certainly humanistic.  Kidman, Efron and MacConaughey are each on top of their games, but its gone to waste on characters who are caricatures, individuals who resemble humans in form only.  Even worse are Oyelowe and Cusack, from opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of social, economic and cerebral status.  Both men come off as reprehensible, but Cusak’s Hillary is so manipulative, disheveled and disgusting that he’s more like a clown than a monster.

Lee Daniels paints his characters with broad strokes, so broad that even the blind can see.  In many ways, Daniels is becoming a more independent, hard “R” rated version of Tyler Perry.  The only thing THE PAPERBOY delivers is a lot of pain and suffering, on all five senses.  

Grade: D