Inflated remake of the Robert Penn Warren Pulitzer-winner, with the pseudonymous "Willie Stark" as Louisiana governor Huey Long, and Oscar-winner Sean Penn as Oscar-winner Broderick Crawford. Penn, sporting a Trotskyite haircut as the backwater populist politician ("Ain't nobody ever helped a hick 'cept a hick hisself"), speaks in an accent so slurrily authentic as to be almost unintelligible, and unlikely, without the boost from the swelling violins in the background, to carry his charisma very far beyond the neighborhood watering hole. Much of the dramatic interest, plus all of the voluminous voice-over, issues from the inner struggles of an impartial newspaper reporter (Jude Law) who crosses the line and signs on as one of the king's men. But writer-director Steven Zaillian, while he has no trouble projecting a tone of parable-like pretentiousness and high-horse moralism (one means: the abstemious, ascetic color, uninterested in the physical world), has a lot of trouble finding a navigable storyline in Robert Warren's rabbit warren of dirty politics, corporate malfeasance, family skeletons. In its place, he fills up the screen with a gallery of Serious Actors -- Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, James Gandolfini, Kathy Baker -- none of whom makes a stronger impression than the former child star, Jackie Earle Haley, as the governor's mummylike bodyguard. Where had this Bad News Bear been keeping himself? (2006) — Duncan Shepherd