Newsmakers (2009), Anders Banke’s remake of Johnnie To’s Breaking News (2004), is an old man’s film about a young man’s world. Banke and his four screenwriters’ moral outrage over the way the media has turned urban violence into a reality show circus has even less bite as social critique as it does as brainless entertainment. Unlike To, whose style of shooting violence has often been compared to ballet, Banke’s violence is just a loud and long slog through an impossible to visualize warzone that’s only really exciting when Banke slows down long enough to show us what’s exploding.
Inert as it is as an action film—though there are plenty of things going boom, just none of them fittingly spectacular—I couldn’t help but look for a way into the film. Though it’s clearly less well-choreographed, suave or even entertaining, Newsmakers’ biggest misstep was sticking so closely to the original plot of Breaking News. In fact, in many ways, it’s almost identical to To’s original. For those unfamiliar with Breaking News, Newsmakers revolves around a hostage situations where both the police and two groups of terrorists exploit the media to spin their stories, leaving a group of hard-working cops led by Smirnov (Andre Merzlikin) to twist in the wind while Katya (Mariya Mashkova), a totally unsympathetic misogynistic caricature, sends in a battalion of troops with tiny cameras on their helmets to win a PR war after footage of a whimpering cop makes the Russian police lose face. The robbers hole up in an apartment building, take hostages and pictures using cell phones, showing that they too are sympathetic human beings. Making viral videos to win the press and hence the people over is a tactic that’s never been tried before, Katya proudly crows; yeah, right.
As the more vocal of the two sides of this “new media” war, Katya’s single-handedly one of the most unbearable aspects of Newsmakers’ heavy-handed political agenda. She’s a generically dumbed-down fall girl that’s only appropriate to the film’s gleefully flat depiction of the police’s gruff boy’s club atmosphere. These manly men are so agog with the pressure of maintaining their image that they apparently will listen to anyone to do so, even an infantile woman that gets dismissed by Smirnov when he quote an aphorism about pretty women being untrustworthy seeing as how they’re naturally vain.
As confirmed by the snickers in the Tribeca auditorium this past Thursday, Katya’s absurd media blitz plan to turn their war on crime into a “reality show,” is apparently ditzy. She’s not a leader and has no practical concept of what the situation calls for, putting a bottle of Valhalla bottled water into each troop’s hands before giving them strategy with which they can infiltrate the building with. She’s so self-obsessed that she even giggles to a girlfriend on the phone that she gets off on having so many men at her beck-and-call. Woman, thou art a scapegoat with or without lipstick.
The other half of the equation is of course the robbers but they’re just as empty-headed as Katya, though not nearly as strident. While they too proudly announce their vacuousness when they mourn a fallen comrade by exclaiming that he will likely ascend to Valhalla, they’re clearly men that speak first with their ever-chattering artillery and with their mouths long afterwards. Smirnov thus becomes a great John McClane-type by default, needing only to scowl at either Katya’s idiocy or the terrorists’ ceaseless violence to earn approval. His actions don’t speak the loudest of the film’s two warring factions but as the most sympathetic character in Newsmakers, I really wish they had.