Costa-Gavras cautionary tale on the media is a bit of an unbalanced movie as it has some good ideas while at the same time it shoves those ideas down our throats with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The story of a reporter who tries to milk a hostage situation as much as he can for personal gain is a good one but needed to be more grounded in reality than it is. As an example, the Travolta character is played way too dumb and we needed to have more of an emotional connection with him for the movie to work. I don't totally blame Travolta for this, I think it's much more a script and direction problem, but his performance didn't help either and the movie loses credibility and weight due to this fact. Also some of the reporter tactics are way over the top and, again, the credibility suffers. With these words it may seem I didn't enjoy the movie, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I think it's a very entertaining movie with a very clear and important message that could have been delivered a bit more efficiently.
