Long Shot

Dan Sterling wrote the script in the early 2010s, and Liz Hannah was brought in to update its politics. Hannah’s first Hollywood job had been at Charlize Theron’s production company, and Theron is both lead and producer here. The project ran under the title Flarsky, renamed a few months before release. Jonathan Levine shot it in Montreal and in Cartagena, Colombia. Fred quits his paper the moment the mogul played by Serkis buys it, so the two strands are tied together from the start. The usual balance of the genre is inverted as well. The footage that threatens a career belongs to the man, not the woman; she decides and he works for her. The closing carries that all the way: as Charlotte is sworn in, Fred takes her surname. Nobody on the production asked Andy Serkis to wear prosthetics as the media owner. He brought the design himself and sat six hours a day in the chair; Levine has said Serkis made choices nobody asked him to make. The 40 million dollar production finished at 53.9 million worldwide. A good fit if you are happy to have a secretary of state talking down a hostage crisis while high in the same film as a climate policy negotiation. Not for viewers troubled by the blackmail recording being described in detail.