The Paperboy is the latest of a series of movies about a class of people lower economically, culturally and sometimes morally. Winter's Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild included people we could admire, but Killing Them Softly, Killer Joe, and now The Paperboy feature characters we would not care to spend time with in real life.
Matthew McConaughey does seem concerned that John Cusack may die for a murder he did not commit, though John Cusack-- guilty or innocent-- is such that the world would be better off without. David Oyelowo wants his newspaper to print what truth he knows, though he is not much concerned about the effects that truth may have. Scott Glenn shares McConaughey's concern over the execution of a man who may not have committed the specific crime for which he was convicted. And Nicole Kidman is mysteriously devoted to the semi-human Cusack, which, I suppose, is at least unselfish, perverse though her taste in men may be.
But that's about the sum of sympathetic elements in a movie so distasteful that its occasional intrusions of "artful" things like split screens, black-and-white footage, over-lit shots and altered frames seem to be there to assure us that we are in the presence of ART... not just human rubbish and graffiti.
But, stick with it to the end-- there are a lot of surprises, and you won't be bored. Maybe disgusted, but not bored.
