2019 is drawing to a close and that means all the movies have officially been released that will compete for all the top honors at the Academy Awards in February.
The competitors for Best Picture include “The Irishman,” “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” “Uncut Gems,” “Little Women,” “1917” and “Marriage Story.”
But there was also a biographical movie about Megyn Kelly that many thought would be a frontrunner for Best Picture but it was way worse than anybody could’ve possibly imagined.
Only a few months ago, Showtime and Blumhouse Productions released a seven-part miniseries about the rise of Fox News to the number one news network on television and how Roger Ailes was the sole influence that made that happen.
“The Loudest Voice” starred Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes and the miniseries largely revolved around him and only sporadically mentioned others like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Gretchen Carlson, and Brian Kilmeade. The focus was on Ailes.
At the time when “The Loudest Voice” aired on Showtime, “Bombshell” was likely wrapping up post-production. “Bombshell” is specifically about Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson and Kayla Pospisil taking on Roger Ailes amid the alleged toxic atmosphere he created as he presided over the network.
Charlize Theron stars as Kelly, Kidman as Carlson, Margot Robbie as Pospisil and John Lithgow as Ailes. Amongst the actors and actresses rounding out the cast are Allison Janney, Malcolm McDowell, Connie Britton, Stephen Root, and Mark Duplass.
The cast alone screams Oscar-worthy.
But it’s director Jay Roach and screenwriter Charles Randolph that made some critics to presuppose “Bombshell” as a Best Picture contender – Randolph wrote “The Big Short” and “The Life of David Gale,” but Roach is known exclusively for political movies like “Trumbo” “The Campaign,” “Game Change” and “Recount.”
However, “Bombshell” was as shallow as a baby pool. And that might be too generous of an analogy.
It’s hard not to really compare the acting performances to that of cheap “SNL” level impersonations, which wasn’t all that surprising considering current cast member star Kate McKinnon is also in “Bombshell” – but it was never elevated past the parody sketch show.
You may have guessed that all the accusations that liberals throw at Fox News on a daily basis are all in “Bombshell,” like xenophobia, bigotry, racism, misogyny, etc. It also demonizes Ailes who left the network in disgrace due to the countless sexual deviance accusations from many Fox News female employees.
But the main problem is that we expected fully fleshed-out characters to navigate this world of Fox News at this particular time but they were as flat as gingerbread men cookies. It was like a high school student using a sole Wikipedia page to expand it into a 30-page paper on such a controversial heavy subject. It plucks at low-hanging fruit.
Even liberals had huge problems with it, which is why it likely won’t be recognized by the Academy Awards come nomination time. In fact, hair and makeup might be the only category it has a shot at being nominated for.
Moreover, liberals had a particular problem with making Megyn Kelly into some kind of heroine in the face of the misogyny that surrounded her.
This is a particular subject that we can all agree with, right? They actually designed her character to not only be empathetic but also troubled by her conscience.
Normally that would make a character more three-dimensional but the line of logic leading up to that moment rang false.
The whole thing felt like it was supposed to be some epitome of the Me Too Movement but it didn’t even work on that level either. The filmmakers were trying to do too much.
In the industry, there’s a saying called “putting a hat on a hat,” which means taking one good idea and putting it on another and then it doesn’t work at all.
This was like putting a hat on a hat, on a hat, on a hat, on a hat. It was like the filmmakers drew different ideas out of a hat and put them all in a blender to see what they came up with. Unfortunately for them, “Bombshell” turned out to be the opposite of a masterpiece.
“Bombshell” actually makes “The Loudest Voice” look like “Citizen Kane” by comparison.