Information is the crutch of this Joan Didion adaptation, and also its curse. So many scenes are about establishing background for a character or the strange arms deal that Elena gets in the middle of, and it makes the overall course of events all the more confusing. It gets worse when you add in the back-stabbings, secret identities, and shady dealings that take place, as Elena finds herself in Costa Rica learning more about how her father's deal directly implicates America. All the while Rees' choppy editing is going at full speed, bouncing between different lives, paralleling Alma’s own secret work, the story dragging us from one place to the next. Characters talk about the mystery of intent to Elena’s work, (maybe because they don’t see her do any reporting during all of this, either), and the question of “Why?” blares loudly in nearly every scene, not just Hathaway’s.
Hathaway is nonetheless all-in on this performance, and if the movie were more focused with Elena’s intent I suspect her sincere work would be better received. Instead she comes off as a character at the center of a parody about a hard-working, fearless journalist, who has a magic intuition when it comes to making the right bold move, and later can hold her own against menacing weapons dealers like Edi Gathegi’s Jones. In reoccurring quieter moments, Hathaway has an emotional core of being a detached mother, and a survivor of breast cancer, but both are distinct character elements that are lost in the fray.
Her supporting actors do not fare much better, and watching “The Last Thing He Wanted” is a great example of seeing professionals on autopilot. Ben Affleck’s approach to playing CIA official Treat Morrison is to speak lowly and with a glum face; Willem Dafoe progressively amps up the mental state of his dying character Richard, but it plays like stock work. And then there’s Perez and Gathegi, who are more story devices to push it along.
Much of Rees' film (co-written with Marco Villalobos) feels like a rough draft, and its dialogue is especially a problem in whatever goal the film has to be taken seriously. Cryptic conversations between stuffy government men in ties (including Affleck’s Morrison) feel especially dry, and become an over-labored point to show how Elena is a threat to crooked parts of the government. And there are numerous humdingers from the script that aim to have extra grit, and instead backfire. The best might be, as delivered ominously: "You ever see a monkey drive? Buckle up. It's gonna be bananas."
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