Veronica Guerin

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * *)

A title card at the end of this biopic of a Dublin journalist murdered in 1996 by drug dealers whose activities she had worked to expose tells us that, since that date, 189 journalists have been murdered worldwide in the course of their work.

The vast majority of those killings will have been in the Third World, so their murders don't register on the radar, but Guerin, 38 when she died, was white and attractive which makes her excellent movie fodder.

Anyone familiar with the work of director Schumacher (Falling Down) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Black Hawk Down) might groan at the prospect of what they'd do to this story. But the film shows remarkable and commendable restraint, delivering a workmanlike though neither inspired nor inspiring reading of Guerin's last years.

The script by Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue delivers a smug and sententious voiceover epilogue which is designed to make us feel good that the title character didn't die in vain (though it's doubtful that a social worker in a Dublin slum would endorse the sentiments) but Schumacher orchestrates the climactic murder, which we half-see in an opening sequence, with panache and chilling dramatic force.

The problem is the bit between those opening and closing moments: a leaden and rather heavy-handed story of a headstrong crusader whose obstinate nature looks remarkably like foolhardiness.

Gallingly for a journalist viewer, Guerin (Blanchett, sporting an impeccable accent) seldom acts like a real journalist. Her professional modus operandi consists mainly in confronting gangland heavies and asking them if they are selling drugs and when she starts doing some research, her questions get vaguer, not more precise.

We're meant to feel sorry for her when she gets thumped but if a journalist came to my door demanding to know where I got the money to buy my house, I'd probably punch her in the nose, too.

One minute she's gung-ho (she brushes off a bullet through the window with "These people issue death threats when their laundry's folded wrong") and the next she's craven (she's a girl, after all, so she has to tell her long-suffering husband at least once, "I'm so scared").

The result is a sort of cartoon journo and I'm inclined to wonder whether Guerin's family think the story honours or trivialises their loved one's memory.

For all that the film has its moments. The music is powerfully used and the design, in which Guerin's red car is the only splash of colour in the dark and grim urban surroundings, is sublime.

More than that, we were probably never entitled to expect.


Cast: Cate Blanchett, Gerard McSorley, Ciaran Hinds, Brenda Fricker

Director: Joel Schumacher

Running time: 92 mins

Rating: R13, contains violence and offensive language

Screening: Bridgeway, Village, Rialto