The Sean Penn Threat

My review is forthcoming, so I'll hold off on lengthy pontification for now (thank me later), but David Edelstein's review of All the King's Men has one of the best paragraphs I've read in a piece of pop criticism this year:

Did we need a new All the King’s Men? There has been a lot of talk about dictatorship and demagoguery and a culture of corruption—and James Carville has lent his name to the remake (as an executive producer) to suggest the story has something urgent to say now. But damned if I know what that is, because Zaillian worries the life out of the thing. He lingers dewily over the banal romance while barely dramatizing the political machinations, so that Penn’s Stark doesn’t seem like a threat to much of anything except the Actor’s Studio.

It's not just clever, though, it's sadly true about the film.