Sean Penn is phenomenal, but just about everything else is wrong in All the Kings Men, a remake of the 1949 Oscar winner about the rise and fall of a popular and controversial Southern politician. Penn stars as Willie Stark (a thinly veiled stand-in for legendary Louisiana Governor Huey P. Long), a well-meaning but shrewd populist who connects with his fellow "redneck hicks," largely through the power of passionate oratory, to the point where he achieves something approaching absolute power and is in turn corrupted absolutely.
The movie's what-profit-a-man-to-gain-the-world-if-he-lose-his-soul shtick is more relevant than ever — and who amongst us isn't interested in those who straddle the fine lines between populist daydreams and demagoguery — but this year's model of All the Kings Men doesn't add anything new to the mix, and crams itself with meaningless, showy gestures.
Director Steven Zaillian imbues the proceedings with a bombastic storytelling approach that feels self-important and dated, and that sometimes verges on unintentional kitsch (complete with a ridiculous musical score tugging desperately at our every stray emotion). As if that weren't bad enough, the performances, Penn's excluded, are all over the map.
The film's problems begin and end with its actors, an ensemble that looks great on paper, but that is, almost to an individual, horribly miscast. Three of the movie's prime roles go to Brits (Jude Law, Kate Winslet and Anthony Hopkins) and their attempts at Southern American accents are dubious at best, abominable at worst (Hopkins doesn't even appear to be going through the motions). All of this pales, however, before the "performance" of James Gandolfini, who certainly looks the part (he's practically Broderick Crawford, the original's lead), but whose Tony-Soprano-does-the-deep-South mewing is so jaw-droppingly ridiculous it makes us want to re-evaluate what Harvey Keitel achieved in The Last Temptation of Christ.
There are several secondary stories going on here as well (all tied together by an overly literal voice-over narration by Law), but when Penn's not on screen there's not much to hold our interest. There are certainly worse ways to spend 128 minutes, but there are better ones, too. Consider renting Robert Rossen's 1949 original of All the Kings Men, for instance. Better still, get your hands on the somewhat similarly themed A Face in the Crowd, starring the immortal Andy Griffith, and see how this sort of material can really come to life.
All the King's Men 2 stars (PG-13) Stars Sean Penn, Jude Law, James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Patricia Clarkson and Mark Ruffalo. Opens September 22 at local theaters.
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2006.