Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24525 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-09-22
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 123 minutes

Synopsis
Sean Penn gives an electrifying performance as rising politician Willie Stark in ALL THE KING'S MEN, the second film based on Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In 1949, the original ALL THE KING'S MEN, directed by Robert Rossen, was a huge hit, earning Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor (Broderick Crawford), and Best Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge) But whereas the novel and first film set the story of pride, ambition, jealousy, and dirty politics in pre-World War II Louisiana, writer-director Steven Zaillian (SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER) moves the action to the 1950s, a much different time in American history, with the Great Depression and the war over and McCarthyism just around the corner. Stark starts out as a man of the people, proud to be a hick, wanting to make a difference to the struggling families in his community. But the smell of power leads to back-room corruption, lies, and betrayal. Stark surrounds himself with smart, well-connected people, including journalist (and narrator) Jack Burden (Jude Law), right-hand man Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini), and doctor Adam Stanton (Mark Ruffalo), using them as both willing and unwilling players in his march to the top. The all-star cast also includes Kate Winslet as Stanton's sister and a former love of Burden's, Anthony Hopkins as a compromised judge, and Jackie Earle Haley as a Stark thug. The film is gorgeously shot by Pawel Edelman, with an emotional soundtrack by James Horner and period music supervised by T Bone Burnett (O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?). Interestingly, Zaillian chose not to watch the original film, basing his screenplay solely on the novel. The remake was the brainchild of former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville, who is one of the executive producers of this stirring political film.

Customer Reviews

An above average film
I tend to raise the bar quite high in life and people find me too critical so imagine my surprise when I found a film I thought better than the general populace seem to. I must admit, I had preconceptions about the film being weak due to knowing it didn't have a high profile and therefore must have been a flop. I also thought the trailer was good and yet somehow simple and I like subtlety in my films. So this time the bar was set low and I was pleasantly rewarded by what I saw. I enjoyed it from start to finish.
First of all, the script is full of rich, poetic prose that most scripts aren't. It made me want to read the book. Second, Louisiana looks beautiful and so do the sets. It made me want to visit the place. Third, I didn't want the film to end. It made me want to watch the extras. I'm so glad that an epilogue was included. There are flaws but they didn't spoil the film for me. Those flaws are basically improbabilities and unexplained things and there's so much going on that is only hinted at it's like chunks of the story we'd like to see are missing (the senator's wife is all but brushed out of the film, we jump forward in time alot etc.) and people seem to behave in ways that they wouldn't in real life but welcome to the world of film where years have to be absurdly compressed into a couple of hours or less.
I think Sean Penn's performance is excellent, as usual, and though Jude Law has made too many films too quickly I think he's well suited to this. Anthony Hopkins doesn't excel himself but even Hopkins on autopilot is high quality. A good film.

pathetic
who give the money for such a bad screenplay? one of the 100000 hollywods movie that have a copy>paste screenplay full of scene already sen in thousands of movies with dull, with many cliche', non-sense talking, unecessary scenes etc, acting and music used with a hollywood standards. I think they should call the director of the russian movie "the return" to re-fresh their copy-paste-standard making of the movies. This is... waste of money for that movies. only thing that is excellent are the photography.