Fair Game: Critic Reviews

Fair Game gets you riled up all over again at a deeply unpatriotic abuse of power.

Things worked out between Joe and Valerie, and for their real-life models, who are now the subjects of a terrifically entertaining movie. But that does not mean that justice was done, or that truth prevailed.

Although the outline of this story is well known, Fair Game gives it dramatic shape and teases out the moral problems raised.

It is complacent and fatuous in a way that only a preeningly well-intentioned Hollywood drama can be.

Liman skillfully intercuts television news footage of the president and administration officials with a skilled cast of actors.

A crackling political thriller that deftly navigates the knife edge between all-too-familiar recent history and more universal personal drama.

A strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

The film's assertion of Plame and Wilson as real people rather than characters consists mostly of draining them of anything compelling.

Though based on a true story with a well-known outcome, Doug Liman's "Fair Game" is as suspenseful as any fictional thriller -- and considerably more tragic.

Most of the scenes depicting the couple's domestic life are borderline-banal, and they miniaturize the political drama that plays out partly in public, partly in the shadows but almost always in a middle distance just beyond emotional reach.

What the filmmakers do capture brilliantly is the human cost of espionage and political gamesmanship.

The only honest work in Fair Game comes from Naomi Watts, an actress who couldn't cheat if she wanted to.

Exposed, abandoned, branded as traitors, the Wilsons finally have no choice but to tell their story, the latest chapter of which is this potent Hollywood melodrama starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts.

Real-world political melodrama, with obvious good and bad guys, but intelligent and well acted.

What's effective is how matter-of-fact Fair Game is. This isn't a lathering, angry attack picture.

Liman's sensibility isn't sophisticated enough to tease out the nuances of what must be a pretty interesting marriage; the movie is more about texture and surfaces and surface tensions. But it moves.

You'd have to go back to All the President's Men for a better example of fresh American political scandal being turned into slam-bang, star-powered drama.

It's a real-life spy drama. It's human drama. It's political drama. And it's engrossing, all around.

A triumph on all counts.

Fair Game" is such a brutal and personal testimony to the consequences of dirty politics that it often feels too ugly to be true. Unfortunately, it is.

Clears up the murky facts and shines a klieg light on the dark, shadowy corridors of the George Bush White House. The story takes on a vital new importance.

Fair Game serves up impeccable politics with a bit too much righteous outrage and not quite enough solid drama.

Unless your pulse races at the mention of Robert Novak, you'll be underwhelmed.

For every spycraft scene, every illustration of the deadly blowback from the leak that Liman dramatizes, the movie has half a dozen scenes of a delicately balanced home life turned on its head by a government bent on destroying one of its critics.

This isn't a message movie, per se, but a strong point of view comes through regardless: In the battle of principles vs. politics, politics always win.