Not lousy, but rather heavy-handed and didactic play on political morality, allegedly set in the modern age. Paul Newman is an indifferent drifter in New Orleans who finds employment at a local radio station whose broadcasts double strictly as a platform for right-wing political beliefs; soon, the extremists for which Newman works have the city riled up in a hotbed of political tension. Adapting his novel "A Hall of Mirrors", Robert Stone writes dialogue and situations which feel curiously dated or clichéd, like the leftover pickings from a movie made some twenty years prior; as a result, the characters fail to emerge. Newman, at one point in his career, cited this picture as his very best, though he's not very good in it, and neither is co-star Joanne Woodward (working hard at feigning low-class). "WUSA" has an excellent sense of its location, due to Richard Moore's solid cinematography, yet its high-flown aims to be a controversial rabble-rouser drown in the din of over-exaggerated grandstanding. *1/2 from ****
Review of WUSA
