State of Play

This movie follows a familiar subset of the thriller genre, that of the journalist investigating a story and discovering there is more involved than what meets the eye, and before he knows it there is evidence of a conspiracy stretching high into government. How high? Well, that of course varies from one conspiracy movie to the next.

I couldn’t help but notice that one of the methods of death early on here was later borrowed by the series House of Cards (U.S. version). But there are only so many ways of making possible murders look like accidents or suicides, so perhaps it was coincidental. The acting and the writing were fine, however familiar the story seemed. It just felt like it wouldn’t have taken much originality to alter the plot to separate it from all the other journalistic investigations of government corruption.