Hire “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon to tell the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? Sure, and next let’s hear from Lady Gaga on the Higgs boson particle.
With its combination story of wartime stealth and web stardom, “The Fifth Estate” tries to be a cross between “The Social Network” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” Only it’s more like “The Sociopath Network” meets “Zero Dumb Thirty.”
As Aussie hacker Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) takes on a German wingman. Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), and builds the WikiLeaks site into the world’s foremost repository for secret materials, Condon and his unfocused screenwriter Josh Singer seem baffled by the technical heart of the story.
As best Condon can imagine the internet, it’s an OfficeMax commercial about an infinite series of identical desks where dreary clones sit typing. When lines appear on screens, they fizz like a mosquito zapper.
There are lots of scenes of guys tapping away at keyboards while their glasses and the monitors reflect each other. All is overlaid with a tacky dial-a-thriller musical score of the kind you’d expect to hear in a “Saturday Night Live” parody of an ’80s detective show.
The internet isn’t cinematic, which is why “The Social Network” focused on personality and dialogue. Yet Condon distinguishes himself: He manages to make Julian Assange boring.
The world’s most wanted/celebrated terrorist/anarchist/freedom fighter/hero comes across as merely a mildly unpleasant drudge.
Condon keeps him on the move, tirelessly flashing city names — Nairobi! Liège! Berlin! Antwerp! Reykjavik! — on the screen to no effect except to convince us that Assange is well traveled. If you’re thinking about opportunities for irony here — as a result of his exertions, Assange has spent the last year and a half in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he is hiding from authorities — you’re getting far too subtle for Condon. He’s content to have everyone speak in banalities like “The cat’s out of the bag” matched with visual clichés, like montages of TV news personalities talking about Assange. The entire movie is a case of a script telling us very obvious, Nightly News-level points it ought to instead be showing.
Assange was considerably weirder and sinister in the intriguing doc “We Steal Secrets” earlier this year. But even though Condon has adapted Domscheit-Berg’s whistleblowing book, he mostly panders to Assange fans, portraying him merely as a bit overzealous in pursuit of freeing information.
In reality, Assange is far less innocent. Condon also glosses over the (despicable) details of the sexual assault case against Assange.
Meanwhile, subsidiary figures are reduced to delivering That-Darn- Assange dialogue. Domscheit-Berg’s girlfriend is so slight a figure you get the sense Condon was making good on a contractual obligation to include a random female. When she and her man decide to take a roll in the hay (interrupted, naturally, by Assange), they do so atop an edition of the Guardian newspaper. Here the movie really stretches credulity: No one has ever felt sexy within 20 feet of that dreadfully sanctimonious, would-be Papal bull from the Vatican of the info wars.