UK Release: 27th October 2006

In his role as wily politician Willie Stark, Sean Penn does a lot of shouting and grand gesticulating, but fails to bring this remake of the 1949 Oscar-winning drama to life. Writer/director Steven Zaillian seems overawed by the task of adapting Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which shows Stark (a character inspired by real-life Louisiana governor Huey P Long) gradually being seduced away from his populist ideals by the lure of power.

Jude Law plays Stark’s right-hand man Jack Burden, who tries to avert scandal while battling his own inner demons. Unfortunately, Zaillian’s script becomes so tangled up in numerous subplots — Burden’s relationship with an old flame (Kate Winslet), to name but one — that supposedly significant revelations have little impact, and so Zaillian is forced to rely on endless talky scenes and a ponderous voiceover to explain the story. And the performances of the undeniably A-list cast, which also includes Anthony Hopkins, seem affected thanks to the ostentatious direction.

Radio Times rating:

**

UK cinema certificate 12
Running time 127mins

Review by Stella Papamichael

While not appearing in the gossip sections of the tabloids over the latest rumours about his relationship with rising starlet Sienna Miller, All the King’s Men’s Law has been a busy boy, having taken most of last year off. First up is The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley director Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering where, alongside Juliet Binoche, Ray Winstone, Martin Freeman and his King’s Men co-star Sean Penn’s wife Robin Wright Penn, Law will play a landscape architect to starts to reassess his life after a run-in with a young burglar.

Next up will be The Holiday, where Law’s King’s Men co-star Kate Winslett plays an unluck-in-love woman who does a house-swap with an equally unfortunate woman, played by Cameron Diaz, in an attempt to turn her life around. Law plays one of the bits of male eye-candy, alongside Rufus Sewell and, somewhat implausibly, scruffy tubster Jack Black.

After a small role in cult Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai’s American road trip movie My Blueberry Nights, hopefully due out in the UK sometime late next year, Law’s most promising – and at the same time most worrying – upcoming project is Sleuth. Starring alongside Michael Caine – who seems to have forgiven Law for destroying his classic character Alfie in the abysmal 2004 remake – this is yet another remake of a British classic, the 1972 flick of the same name in which the younger Caine entered a battle of wits with Laurence Olivier over a marital infidelity. We can but hope that yet more cinematic memories aren’t soiled in the process…

Politically active Penn, playing the populist demagogue Willie Stark in this week’s All the King’s Men, at the start of October again hit the headlines in the US for yet another outspoken attack on President Bush. In a statement read out by his King’s Men co-star Mark Ruffalo at a meeting subtly entitled “World Can’t Wait—Drive Out the Bush Regime”, Penn – who visited Iraq in December 2002, prior to the US-led invasion – lambasted “the arrogant, the misguided, and the cowards [who] argue that an immediate pull-out of our troops from Iraq would inspire lack of confidence and the lost credibility of the United States.” Supporters of Bush were once again, unsurprisingly, a tad miffed.

In terms of film work, Penn has only one acting project in the pipeline. Due out in 2008, In Search of Captain Zero will see him play a surfer and former drug-runner who heads off on a road-trip through Central America to find a long-lost buddy with whom to share his dream of an “endless summer”. Could be a return to Penn’s breakout stoner role in the 80s classic Fast Times at Ridgemount High, but with the Central American setting and Penn’s involvement, it’s pretty much guaranteed there’s going to be some critique of US policy in the region.

Penn is currently trying out his skills behind the camera again with Into the Wild, a self-penned adaptation of a 1997 book based on a true story about a university who suddenly gave up all his possessions, hitchhiked to Alaska and lived in a school bus in the forbidding wilderness. He’s got some decent talent on board, with Lords of Dogtown star Emile Hirsch in the lead role and the likes of Vince Vaughn and Catherine Keener in support. Could be worth keeping an eye on.

Veteran Hopkins may be about to hit his 69th birthday (on 31st December), but he’s certainly not showing his age in terms of workload, with three more films already wrapped since finishing his duties on this week’s All the King’s Men.

The one he’ll be most keen to see do well is Slipstream - largely because not only does he star, but also wrote and directed this surreal psychological exploration of a screenwriter (played by Christian Slater) who starts becoming unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. No release date has yet been set, but then again, it is still in post-production.
Next up, Hopkins looks to be moving back to his most commercially successful role as serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Only it seems that copyright has prevented the producers of Fracture from using that name, so instead Hopkins will be known as the altogether less sinister-sounding Ted, a psycho hounding a young assistant DA. Again, a UK release date has yet to be set, though it is out in the States in the Spring. Another familiar role will be in the recently-announced Harry and the Butler, where Hopkins will – following his acclaimed role in 1993’s The Remains of the Day – play a butler, this time hired by an aging blues man, to be played by Morgan Freeman.

Most promising of all, however, the Welsh national treasure will be cropping up as the beseiged King Hrothgar in Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis’s much-anticipated cinematic adaptation of the ancient epic poem Beowulf. With Ray Winstone in the title role and supported by the likes of John Malkovich, Robin Wright Penn, Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie, it looks all set to be one of the biggest films of Christmas 2007.

The man best known as Tony Soprano may have had a break from New Jersey in this week’s All the King’s Men, but as he’s currently filming for the Sopranos computer game, the mob seems never far behind. His next major film project will be starring as infamous writer Ernest Hemmingway in an as yet untitled project looking at the author and journalist’s romance with fellow writer Martha Gellhorn, the inspiration for Hemmingway’s masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Lined up to play Gellhorn is none other than Robin Wright Penn, wife of Gandolfini’s co-star Sean Penn from King’s Men, who seems to be making films with pretty much everyone involved with this weeks’ releases…

Though he doesn’t have any more directing projects lined up, the writer/helmer of this week’s political remake All the King’s Men has provided the screenplay for Sir Ridley Scott’s next project after this week’s other big release, A Good Year. A 1970s-set period piece, American Gangster will see Scott’s current favourite leading man, Russell Crowe, starring alongside Denzel Washington as a detective trying to prevent a drug lord from importing heroin into Harlem in the coffins of soldiers killed in Vietnam.