Miss Sloane

Miss Sloane casts Jessica Chastain as the title character, a tough, hard-as-nails lobbyist who risks her considerable reputation to launch a seemingly unwinnable crusade against the gun industry. There’s certainly a lot within Miss Sloane worth admiring and appreciating – Chastain delivers as solid a performance as one has come to expect, for example – and yet the movie remains curiously (and continuously) uninvolving for the duration of its overlong running time. Jonathan Perera’s almost absurdly dense screenplay, which completely lacks an entry point for the viewer, offers up scene after scene of characters talking about (and referring to) topics that couldn’t be less interesting, and the movie does, as a result, suffer from a hands-off, arms-length atmosphere that grows more and more pronounced as time progresses (ie it’s virtually impossible to embrace a narrative that’s overflowing with meaningless chatter of filibusters and polling and the like). The movie’s periodic smattering of effective sequences, coupled with an impressively stacked supporting cast (which includes, among others, John Lithgow, Dylan Baker, Mark Strong, and Michael Stuhlbarg), paves the way for a watchable vibe, at least, although the lack of momentum ensures that one’s efforts at embracing the material fall flat on a dispiritingly consistent basis (ie the film is ultimately neither good nor bad; it just is). By the time the unexpected yet far-from-stirring third-act twist rolls around, Miss Sloan has cemented its place as a perfectly competent endeavor that never quite rises above the level of barely-passable mediocrity.

** out of ****