A brave hero gets turned into a villain - but who do you trust?
Eastwood is a noted libertarian, so it’s hardly surprising to see him drawn to a story that vilifies the government while glorifying the quiet heroism of an ordinary working man, but the main target of his ire here is quite clearly a mass media that is so all-consumed with sensationalist headlines and selling as much copy as possible that it will blithely trample all overdue process, civil rights and empirical truth along the way.
Admittedly, there is a slight whiff of opportunism about a film that, at a time when the president of the United States of America calls the media the enemy of the people, is a savage indictment of that same media. On the other hand, though, his clear distrust of the government doesn’t come through anywhere near as powerfully in this film as it does in the constant, real-world media coverage of what is surely one of the most distrustful US administrations in living memory.
Scruggs is basically used as a representative of the worst kind of journalist but, regardless of whether the film’s distorted depiction of her is simply a case of dramatic license or something more purely critical, it’s an odd and rather unfair departure from the facts in a film that is otherwise so accurate.
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