Release: Kill Bin Laden

 

Kill Bin Laden

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Historical

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Writer: Alex Conn

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Liam Neeson, Jamey Sheridan, Annette Bening, Stanley Tucci, Adam Scott, Stephen Lang

Budget: $50,000,000

Domestic Box Office: $39,229,943

Foreign Box Office: $17,505,995

Total Profit: -$29,221,700

Reaction: Kill Bin Laden unfortunately joins Repeal and Replace, Mises, and Dean as another costly political flop for the studio from writer Alex Conn.

"Kill Bin Laden has a strong premise and an inherently tense historical endpoint, but the execution is far too blunt to fully work as drama. Scenes are overloaded with exposition, characters explain themselves instead of revealing themselves, and the dialogue often sounds more like cable-news reenactment than lived-in human conversation. Jamie Foxx and the supporting cast are interesting on paper, but the material gives them little room for nuance. There’s a solid political thriller buried in here somewhere, but this version feels more like a first draft than a finished film." - Cooper Wilson, The Earl Hayes Press

"Kill Bin Laden is a film of heavy subjects and light insight - talky, shapeless political thriller that mistakes repetition for tension. Nearly every scene unfolds in the same handful of rooms, with the same small circle of characters reciting the same clunky, wood exposition-laden dialogue. Darren Aronofsky's trademark style is suffocated here by the teleprompter-style script. Despite a strong cast on paper, everyone from Jamie Foxx to Liam Neeson seems stranded, lost in endless meetings that go nowhere. For a story about one of the most high-stakes missions in modern history, Kill Bin Laden somehow manages to make killing the world’s most wanted man feel pointless." - Cal Crowe, Washington Globe

"Kill Bin Laden feels like a Wikipedia article came to life — and not in a cool, Fincher-style procedural kind of way. The filmmakers try to turn the hunt for the world’s most wanted man into an intense political chamber piece, but the result is two hours of people standing in the same rooms, explaining the same thing over and over like a bad group project. There’s no sense of time, place, or even urgency - all talk, no tension. Jamie Foxx’s Obama smokes, paces, and debates, but we never feel the stakes of his decisions. For a movie about tracking down Osama Bin Laden, Kill Bin Laden somehow forgets to make us care that anyone’s hunting him." - Dave Manning, Ridgefield Press

Rated R for strong language and thematic material