Having just experienced two 10+ hour plane flights in the past two weeks, I sure have had my fill of bad films. When you are on flights of that duration and have a hard time sleeping on planes like I do,you will watch almost anything to help pass the time. Most of that time on this trip was filled with bad films a couple of which I may review when they arrive on Blu-ray in the next couple of months. It was therefore a pleasure once I returned home, to pop in State of Play, a well written and acted thriller that I enjoyed immensely, making up for all the bad films I watched on those flights, well almost.

Film

To say that I enjoyed this film would be an understatement. State of Play is based on a successful BBC series of the same name that has been adapted extensively for the theater and an American audience. The film stars Russell Crowe as Cal McCaffrey, a reporter with the Washington Globe who is investigating two shootings, one of which resulted in a murder. He also happens to be the college roommate of Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) a young and up and coming Congressmen from the 7th Congressional District in Pennsylvania, whose lead staff investigator apparently committed suicide at a DC Metro station the morning after the night of the two shootings.

At the time, Congressman Collin’s committee was investigating the activities of Pointcorp, a private military firm that was providing soldiers for the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere at immense cost to the taxpayers and resulting in substantial profits for Pointcorp. While McCaffrey is investing the double homicide, one of the paper’s bloggers, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), has posted a story that Congressman Collins had been having an affair with his now deceased staffer, Sonia. McCafferty soon discovers that there was a link between the two shootings he was investigating and the alleged suicide of Congressman Collin’s staffer, when he discovers her cell phone number on the cell phone of one of the shooting victims. From there, he and Della, work together to piece together the linkage among the two shooting victims, the deceased staffer, Congressman Collins and Pointcorp.

I found the film to be very well written and directed. There are obvious parallels between the characters in the film and events in today’s news, with Pointcorp looking suspiciously like another private military contractor that has played a prominent role in the news headlines of the day, namely Blackwater. I would rather not give too much more of the plot to this film away so as to not spoil the film for you. Let’s just say that the film is filled with numerous twists and turns as McCaffrey and Della attempt to track down the real story behind the events they are covering. Unlike too many thrillers, the plot twists here are not contrived and are very well thought out to keep our attention. This is a fine film that really deserves a wide audience on Blu-ray. Highly recommended.

Video

I must say that I really loved the video quality on this release and is another in a string of solid encodes from Universal. The film features a wonderfully natural color palette with deep and rich blacks and excellent rendition of skin tones. For the most part, clarity and detail is excellent resulting in an image of great depth and three dimensionality, which really helps to pull you into the film. Shadow detail is excellent as well with not even a hint of digital noise in the darker scenes in the film. The image quality of most of this film is fully worthy of a 5 star rating. However, I felt it necessary to knock the overall rating down just a peg due to some softness to the image in some of the dimmer lit scenes, which lacked the sharpness, detail and depth of the rest of the film. Overall, this is an excellent encode and is one that will no doubt please fans of the film.

Audio

While I enjoyed the lossless audio track on this release, it was not quite up to the level of quality attained by the video presentation. On the plus side, the dialogue track was well recorded and well placed in the mix. Each and every syllable of dialogue is clear and easy to follow which is important in a film such as this. Overall, I also found the imaging and transparency to be very good as well. With an excellent sense of depth in the room both front to back and side to side.

Where I felt that the encode came up a tad short involved the overall sense of dynamics which fell a bit flat as well as the use of the surrounds. While the surrounds were active throughout the film, I felt that they could have been used more aggressively to create an even more immersive sound field, which would have added to the tension of the narrative on screen a little more. The sound mix certainly did have its moments, such as a shooting early on in the film that nearly jolted me off my seat. It is just that I would have preferred a more immersive sound mix that that provided here. Finally, I also found that the overall fidelity of the sound to be just a tad on the bright side, but far from harsh and not really fatiguing even at reference levels.

Special Features

There are really few extras included with this release which I found to be quite surprising. There are two deleted scenes included in standard definition as well as a Making of featurette that is presented in high definition. Universal has also included the U Control feature here which you can activate while watching the film. Should you chose to do so, a small box pops up on screen which shows you an ariel view of the section of Washington DC where that scene in the film takes place, sort of like Google Earth. I can’t really say that I found the implementation of the U Control feature on this release all that interesting. Perhaps you will feel otherwise.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for a tight and taut thriller that is intelligently written and well acted and that features excellent video, State of Play just might be the film for you and is highly recommended.