At a time when what passes for news in the United States tends to be filtered either through the White House spin machine or the agendas of giant corporations, it's easy to forget that there are still a few actual journalists out there, some of whom still risk their own lives in pursuit of a story. In the decade from 1992 to 2002, no fewer than 366 journalists have been killed. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 76 percent of those were murdered in direct retaliation for their reporting. One of the most recent of these, and certainly the most familiar to Americans, is Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose story is rumored to have been snapped up by Warner Brothers for an upcoming film.

As infamous in Ireland as Pearl's murder was in the U.S. was the June 1996 murder of Veronica Guerin, an Irish journalist who was covering the drug lords then running rampant in the slum neighborhoods of Dublin. Guerin was shot dead at point-blank range by two men on a motorcycle while stopped at a traffic light, leaving behind a husband and six-year-old son. Following her death, law enforcement authorities, perhaps embarrassed into action, began what became Ireland's largest-ever criminal investigation, which resulted in over 150 arrests, a crackdown on Dublin's drug gangs, and changes to several libel laws in Ireland that had not only protected the identities of known drug dealers, but made it easy for them to hide the source of their wealth.

Guerin's story, involving as it does an attractive, gutsy heroine, some very real bad guys, and a tragic ending, is the stuff screenplays are made of, and so it was inevitable that her story would eventually make it to the screen. One might have expected someone like Neil Jordan (director of The Crying Game and Michael Collins) or Terry George, who helmed The Boxer and The Butcher Boy, to take on this Irish icon. Instead, the film is directed by American director Joel Schumacher, who has a long track record of watchable, workmanlike, if unspectacular films, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is usually associated with Blowing Up Stuff Real Big. But with a compelling story and Cate Blanchett (a.k.a. She Who Can Do No Wrong) on board, perhaps Bruckheimer thought this might be an easy Oscar®. Yet Schumacher's sure hand has once again produced a watchable, workmanlike, if unspectacular film in VERONICA GUERIN.

The main problem with VERONICA GUERIN is that with Guerin's death occuring at the beginning of the film, Schumacher must rely on the screenplay, his own skill at building suspense towards a preordained outcome, and his actors' skill at creating characters, to sustain interest in a story arc the outcome of which is never in doubt. The film wants to portray a noble woman who died trying to save Ireland from drug gangs, but as written, Veronica Guerin's motivation is never clear. She seems more like a journeyman reporter who stumbles upon the drug story purely by accident than someone who's been doing crime reporting for a while. Seeing this as an opportunity to become a "real" journalist, she seems before our very eyes to become as addicted to the adrenaline rush of danger as the slackers lurking in doorways are to heroin. She seems reckless and foolhardy, rather than heroic, and this makes her story less compelling than it would otherwise be. When fellow journalists dismiss her derisively as a publicity hound and showboater in a pub that serves as the Independent's watering hole, we're supposed to be angry at them for dissing Our Heroine, but instead we find ourselves concurring. If Schumacher's purpose were to examine this aspect of Guerin's personality -- the reasons why she put not just herself, but her husband and son, in danger seemingly just for the sake of a story, this would have been the kind of multifaceted character study that an actress with the talent of Cate Blanchett could really sink her teeth into and turn into something special. Instead, Schumacher goes for the facile heroic angle, and never quite convinces us.

None of this is the fault of Cate Blanchett, who turns in yet another effortlessly perfect performance. With a pitch-perfect Irish lilt in her voice, and done up like Princess Di playing Nancy Drew, she clip-clops through the movie in a series of incongruously beautifully-tailored suits and leg-emphasizing high-heeled shoes; the kind of spunky career gal you'd expect to see someone like oh, say, Carole Lombard play in a 1930's women's picture. Blanchett tries mightily to give this character as scripted some depth, but there's only so much even she can do. It's a shame, too, because hers is just one of three terrific performances in this film. Gerard McSorley is appropriately menacing, but never over the top as drug ringleader John Gilligan, who savagely beats Guerin after she has the audacity to drive to his much-fortified home and ask him point blank about from whence his money comes.

The terrific Irish character actor Ciarán Hinds, who was so riveting in the televised adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge earlier this year, subtly handles the composite character of John Traynor, who has been Guerin's informant on other crime stories. Traynor clearly fancies her, for all that he's using her to help create a war among rival drug gangs, and the scenes in which they do their little dance that is half courtship, half mutual exploitation, show a sexual tension that bring an otherwise often plodding film to life.

The other performance worth mentioning is an all-too-brief, but electric appearance by Colin Farrell (who Schumacher put on the map in Tigerland and who appeared earlier this year in Schumacher's Phone Booth). With his nearly shaven head and spider web tattoo making him look as if he's just passing through during a cigarette break from the Daredevil set, and billed here merely as "Tattooed Boy", his streetboy looks Our Heroine up and down as she asks him questions merely because he's standing there, asks her to come with him for a drink, and then shrugs off her rebuff as he leaves this film and moves on to play Alexander the Great for Oliver Stone.

Schumacher isn't a subtle director, and his idea of style usually involves a fair amount of testosterone, whether appropriate or not. VERONICA GUERIN is no exception, and indeed, it's clear that he's most in his element when there's something violent going on, such as a scene in a pub in which several people are executed, gangland-style. His camera lingers on the incidents of brutalization Guerin encounters during the course of her work -- being shot in the leg at point-blank range in her own home, her beating at the hands of Gilligan, and the scene of Guerin's murder is so important to him that he shows the murder to us not once but twice, lingering lovingly over the corpse the second time. These scenes felt vaguely pornographic to me; I don't even want to think how Guerin's husband and son felt when they saw this.

Cate Blanchett has yet to put in a bad performance, and God knows she does with this characterization what she can, even if that means giving her a misguided messiah complex. But not even the Divine Cate can make this extremely conventional film anything more than ordinary.

-- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2003 Jill Cozzi and Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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