by Lisa Hemsley

Created on: June 09, 2010   Last Updated: June 10, 2010

When two people are murdered, Cal McCaffrey is given the task of reporting about it for the Washington Globe. He takes on the story and soon finds things are not as they seem. Whilst working on the story, he gets breaking news about his old friend, Stephen Collins, who is now a Congressman and how he was having an affair with one of his investigators who has been found dead. Collins asks Cal for help and he agrees to help him. Col is not happy though when the story about Collins and his affair are given to a young Della to report and he makes it clear he is not happy to editor Cameron.

Soon Cal makes more discoveries, which lead to his and Della’s story being connected, and before he knows where he is he has uncovered some very shocking news but he now has to work together with Collins and Della to get the proof they need to bring the story out to the world. Can Cal and Della work as a team to uncover the truth and how involved will the police let them get when people are getting murdered for getting too close to the truth?

This film only really appealed to me as it starred Russell Crowe and Ben Rachel McAdams and despite them not getting along at the start of the film the way they got to like each other and worked together showed in a good way and there was a good father daughter type of relationship between them both.

Ben Affleck played the role of Collins and he too gave a good performance, he came across as a genuine guy who had made a massive mistake and genuinely seemed sorry for it. I found he was easy to get to know and he suited the role. We had a good cast of supporting actors, but for me the best one was that of Helen Mirren, who played the Editor Cameron. She was a hard woman who wanted to get her job done and was very outspoken. I think I would have liked to have seen slightly more of her in the film as she was a good character. Other actors included, Robin Wright Penn, Jason drama of the scenes.

From watching the credits at the end of this film, I have now found out that this film was based on a television series of the same name. However, as I have never watched this, I cannot make any comparisons as to how well it has been adapted to the big screen. The DVD which we have does have some bonus features which include:-

Deleted Scenes
The Making of State of Play

As neither me or hubby are fans of bonus features we have not watched these so I cannot give comments on them.

The running time of this film is 2 hours and 2 minutes and for me I did find this slightly too long. I was entertained from start to finish with the story but for me it was a little slow in the middle and could have easily lost a good 10-15 minutes without losing anything from the storyline. The certificate is a 12 as there I one use of strong language and some moderate violence and personally I would have put this at 15 as there are some tense scenes and I think they are not suitable for a 12 year old to be watching. We paid just £5 for this DVD from Amazon and now as I have bought it already it is being shown occasionally on Sky Movies, which I am not happy about!

Overall, this is a solid 4 star film, the acting is super and the storyline is very engaging. The one problem which stopped me giving it 5 stars was the slowness in the middle. Definitely one to watch when you get the chance.

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