Movie Review: Richard Jewell

Happy New Year and hello 2020! We're starting off the new set of dates fresh and looking forward to a lot of new adventures, films, games, and just about anything I can review and talk about - and what better way to start than with the very first film I caught this January 2020 - Clint Eastwood's newest biographical drama pic "Richard Jewell".

Based on the real life 1996 Olympic Centennial Park Bombing incident that saw the man of the same name saving lives and praised as a hero but quickly denounced as the suspect himself, "Richard Jewell" takes a good and long hard look at society, media, and government as they quickly become wrapped in suspicion, paranoia, and breaking the life of a common man who naively believes in the system but quickly learns the hard truth about it.

Thanks to Warner Bros. Pictures, I got to see the film last week in the brand new Estancia Cinemas wing - and what a tale this was featuring a stellar cast led by Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, and Paul Walter Hauser as the titular character Richard Jewell. This is the kind of movie that should entertain anyone who likes drama and character study performances - Jewell's life as your common man, average joe redneck who has an idealistic impression about law enforcement quickly turns into a real-life tale of heroism when he discovers a bomb planted during his watch as a security guard in an Olympic Games concert held at Centennial Park. Jewell manages to inform his peers and prevent the bomb from claiming more casualties - but things turn upside down when the FBI and press twist his profile and are convinced "he is the bomber". With nowhere else to turn and his life with his mother turning upside down, Richard enlists the help of an old lawyer friend Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) - and the fight to clear his name begins.


RICHARD JEWELL - Official Trailer
As the first film I got to see for the new year, Richard Jewell impresses and manages to tell a very relatable and compelling tale of an innocent man's quest to fight back against the system that wrongly judged him. We see in a pre-Social Media setting of 1996 just how gruelling that kind of experience is, and Eastwood has made one of his strongest biographical films yet with strong performances - particularly Sam Rockwell as lawyer Watson Bryant and Kathy Bates as Richard Jewell's mother "Bobi" (for which she has been nominated for an Academy Award). I'd definitely recommend the film to those who enjoy seeing a dramatization of a real life story.

Richard Jewell is now showing in theaters.

Rating - 4/5