By Hoai-Tran Bui/Dec. 13, 2019 8:00 am EST
Roach appears to have attended the Adam McKay school of “serious comedy”: the first half of the film is packed full of shifting POVs and breakneck editing as each character gets her cheeky fourth-wall breaking introduction. Charlize Theron kicks things off as Megyn Kelly, looking nearly unrecognizable underneath subtle prosthetics that ever-so-slightly limit her facial expressions.
John Lithgow is appropriately reprehensible as Ailes, painted as a paranoid, power-hungry abuser. While Ailes looms large throughout the film, his character actually doesn’t appear much — which makes sense, considering this film is supposedly about the women who he affected. While the interactions he has with several characters, especially Kelly and Rupert Murdoch and his sons (at which point the film suddenly turns into Succession), gives more nuance to this character, he remains very much the flat Big Bad of the piece.Bombshell attempts to tap into the topical vein of powerful men being taken to task for sexual harassment or assault, but manages to do it with all the nuance of a Saturday Night Live sketch (the latter of which is made clear with a rotating door of appearances by characters like Bill O’Reilly, Bret Baier, Rudy Giulani, Jeanine Pirro, and others as if they were SNL impressions). It’s a surface-level approach to a complicated subject that softballs the entire controversy and miscasts its female anchors as feminist heroes./Film Rating: 5 out of 10
