The Paperboy (2012)

The Paperboy delivers a story riddled with nonsense, boredom, trashy characters, gratuitous vulgarity, and wasted talent.  It was amazing the amount of scenes in the movie that were completely unnecessary.

The film is about a newspaper reporter (Matthew McConaughey) who teams up with his brother (Zac Efron) and a work colleague (David Oyelowo) to investigate the case of a prisoner (John Cusack) who is on death row.  Along the way, they get help from the prisoner’s pen pal girlfriend (Nicole Kidman).

The movie takes it’s time setting the stage for what it is going to be about.  Once you understand the goal that the characters are trying to accomplish, the story takes a left turn and does not come back to the main point until it is no longer relevant.  In other words, the film is left without a purpose and you are left watching characters develop for a story that is hard to follow and no longer matters.

Much of the movie is narrated by Macy Gray.  Gray was an extremely poor choice for a narrator.  She is definitely no Morgan Freeman.  It seemed as if she had trouble reading her lines.  She mumbled her words very slowly and at times, she was hard to understand.  This took even more away from the film and made it harder to follow.

Many times I was so bored with the movie that I wanted to turn it off.  Other times I wanted to turn off the movie because of how unnecessarily vulgar and pointless it was becoming.  I should have turned it off.  I wish that I had turned it off, but I wanted to see if it would get any better, and I wanted to be able to tell my readers my honest opinion of the entire film.

The Paperboy had a very capable cast.  They are all mostly good actors, but with the material that they had to work with, they were all doomed.  Nobody had a chance to give a standout performance because the writers had made sure of that with their dreadful dialogue and horrible storyline.

Do not waste your time or money on this worthless excuse for a movie.

I give this movie a 1 on a scale of 1-10.

Buy, rent, or run?  Run and hide!

I think that this movie could easily have won the prize for worst movie of 2012.  I was trying to figure out which movie was worse, this one or Killing Them Softly.  The Paperboy takes the cake.  Beware!