I went into INK thinking it was going to be another movie about an evil corrupting billionaire, putting money ahead of ethics, in the manner of THE SOCIAL RECKONING, ARTIFICIAL, MUSK and BUNKER. But in this film, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is the one being corrupted! Instead, it's his newly appointed editor of British tabloid The Sun, Larry Lamb, that's doing the corrupting. Not just of Rupert Murdoch but the entire British public.
As the film opens, Murdoch (Guy Pearce) and Lamb (Jack O'Connell) are meeting in Rules restaurant in Covent Garden. Rupert is pissed off that he's not taken seriously by the British media establishment on account of being an Australian. So he's bought a left-leaning broadsheet called The Sun, and is trying to hire Lamb to run it. Lamb is likewise an outsider: a Northern journalist working on the then best-selling tabloid, The Mirror, but blocked from getting the top job by a long-serving editor. Murdoch wants Lamb to overtake The Mirror. His sole innovation is to turn it into a tabloid and to give Lamb the funding to assemble a team of "undesirables". Lamb's innovation is to ask what the British people actually care about and to write about that, no matter how trashy or beyond the pale.
And of course the plan works. Sleaze sells. Lamb is delighted. Murdoch is more squeamish and prudish. But you can't deny the sales figures. Even when a senior exec's wife is kidnapped, and Lamb splashes it all over the front page, Murdoch does not restrain him, let alone sack him. Money talks.
There's a lot to like about this film, and most of it centres of the twin lead performances from Pearce and O'Connell. I also think it will help a younger generation to understand how we ended up with the tabloid media culture of the 80s and 90s and by extension the scurrilous online TMZ culture we now live with. To that extent, this movie would pair well with PRIMETIME.
But what I didn't like was the fundamental framing, by screenwriter James Graham, based on his own stage-play. I get that Murdoch wasn't always the man he became, but I think it's weird to frame the entire film as the corruption of Murdoch. And it's even weirder not to do so showing the influence that his then wife and his mother had on him. Once his mum died, the gloves really came off. I also feel that Graham failed to turn his play into a screenplay. There's way too much portentous monologuing, especially from Claire Foy's female journo who seems to act as the voice of conscience in the film.
I also pretty much hated Danny Boyle's direction. I get that he's trying to stop it feeling staid and stagey but having weird camera angles is a cheap trick and doesn't substitute for actual cinematic style. I also think it is deeply hypocritical to make a whole film about the morally corrupt media and then to infringe IP and use AI to exploit the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It cheapens the film, and it makes Danny Boyle look like a screaming hypocrite. He should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.
INK is rated R and has a running time of 1hr 56m. It played Venice, Telluride and Toronto. It opens in the USA on December 11th and in the UK on January 8th 2027.
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