Producing a serious political thriller is a rare enough achievement these days, so one is tempted to excuse the flaws in Steven Zaillian's "All the King's Men," a film loosely based on the rise and fall of Louisiana's populist governor Huey P. Long. Nevertheless, the film feels like it lost several crucial segments on the editing room floor. Thirty minutes into the film, you'll be scratching your head, wondering who several of the main characters are supposed to be. In the final reel, entire subplots just disappear up in smoke, leaving the unpleasant feeling that you've been jerked around for the past two hours.
Zaillian should know better. Best known for the Oscar he got for his screenplay for "Schindler's List," he's also worked on screenplays for films as diverse as "A Clear and Present Danger" and "Gangs of New York," while directing "Searching for Bobby Fisher" and "A Civil Action." The man certainly knows how to do tight, polished plotting, so it's a mystery why "All the King's Men" comes off so slipshod.
The film's source is the 1946 novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren, which had already been brought to the screen in 1949 with Robert Rossen's Oscar-winning version. No doubt the tale felt more relevant then; Huey Long's career as a working-class hero was recent history, and the politics he espoused were still on the table. Some 70-plus years after Long's death, the specifics are less pertinent, so Zaillian goes for a more "mythic" approach, the results of which are somewhat overblown.