Jeremy Renner’s crusading reporter Gary Webb wins over audience in movie Kill the Messenger

REVIEW: Jeremy Renner has an uphill battle to convince audiences of the worthiness of MOVIE Kill the Messenger’s real-life subject matter.

Kill the Messenger (M)

Director: Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.)

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt.

Rating: ***

One man’s words are one nation’s poison

If you want to be a whistle blower, you can expect to be a pariah shortly thereafter.

So goes the lesson outlined by Kill the Messenger, a no-frills conspiracy thriller based on a true story.

Jeremy Renner stars as Gary Webb, a crusading journalist with a small-time newspaper who broke one of the biggest political exposés of the 1990s.

It was Webb that located the missing links in a chain of information that connected the CIA to a complex network of drug dealers in Central America.

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Committed and unshowy performance ... Jeremy Renner as Gary Webb in a scene from film Kill the Messenger.

If that wasn’t enough, Webb took his crusade many dangerous steps further. It was his belief that by sanctioning this scheme, the US government deliberately permitted a crack cocaine epidemic to devastate African-American communities across the nation.

If Kill the Messenger faces one tough obstacle, it is overcoming the in-built indifference of an audience to its worthy subject matter.

The filmmakers spend a lot of screen time and creative energy on searching for a dramatic urgency to Webb’s efforts that arguably was never there in the first place.

It is worth bearing in mind that Webb’s award-winning investigation did not commence until a full decade after all the dirty deeds were done.

Strong cast ... Michael Sheen, who plays Fred Weil, and Jeremy Renner (Gary Webb) in Washington D.C. in film Kill the Messenger.

A film on the same subject another 20 years later was always going to struggle to prove its relevance.

If Kill the Messenger does achieve that goal, it is all due to Renner’s heroically committed and unshowy performance.

Wins over the most doubtful viewer ... Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jeremy Renner in a scene from new movie, Kill the Messenger.

The actor’s affinity with Webb — and his ongoing outrage at what happened so long ago — is enough to eventually win over most doubtful viewers.