Cannes Film Festival
The presence of Doug Liman’s name in the Cannes competition lineup has inspired many an unkind crack from an idle critic — this writer couldn’t resist a couple himself. There can’t have been many filmmakers to enter that lofty club immediately after a film as uniformly reviled as “Jumper,” an inept high-concept blockbuster that drowned Liman’s flip, clever-clever personality in lumbering effects and noise.
Coming to Cannes, then, he has a dual point to prove: not only that he can hold his own among arthouse titans, but that he can even stand up against his own previous (now rather distant) best work.
Has he succeeded? Well, yes and no. Liman has chosen something of a lazy shortcut back to respectability: a biopic, of an honorable-lefty martyr figure, with just enough Washington-thriller varnish not to frighten the horses. It’s certainly a curious choice as the lone representative of U.S. cinema in the world’s foremost international film contest, but it’s oddly appropriate, too: this is down-the-middle Hollywood craftsmanship, short on innovation and revelation, but effective and engrossing with it. For better or worse, there’s nothing else like this in Competition.