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| Veronica Guerin DVD Review |
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Order this DVD from Amazon.com
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Veronica Guerin
(Buena Vista Home Entertainment)
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| DVD Release Date:
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March 16, 2004
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| Length:
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98 mins.
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| Rated:
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R
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| Format:
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Widescreen (2.35:1)
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| Audio:
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Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, DTS 5.1 Surround Sound, French
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| Subtitles:
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Spanish Subtitles, Closed Captioned
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| Extras:
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Deleted Scene with Optional Director Commentary, The Real-Life Veronica Guerin, Public Mask, Private Fears Featurette, A Conversation With Jerry Bruckheimer Featurette, Producer’s Photo Gallery, Audio Commentary with Director Joel Schumacher, Audio Commentary with Writers Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue
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Veronica Guerin is the true story of, well, Veronica Guerin, an Irish reporter writing for Ireland's The Sunday Independent. Guerin, an investigative reporter, decided to expose the seedy underbelly of Dublin's drug trade. In the process, she found herself exposed.
Prior to watching this movie, I knew nothing about Veronica Guerin. If you find yourself in the same circumstances, I would recommend waiting until after you have seen the movie to acquaint yourself with the details of her life. It made the movie much more interesting and made the end much more poignant and surprising.
This movie is all about Cate Blanchett. She carries the film and, to be quite honest, without her this would have been a "straight to video" loser. The script is not as tight or as interesting as it could have been and the remaining cast appear to be happy to linger the in background and bask in the glow of Blanchett's performance. She takes the movie to another level.
The movie's principal shortcoming is its failure to portray Veronica Guerin, the person. We see her chasing her story, but that is about all that we see. We know that she has a husband and a child, but we don't have any insight into her home life or her relationships with her family. We don't know why she is prepared to put everything on the line in pursuit of a story. The movie gives us a one-dimensional perspective of her life. And the absence of this perspective is noticeable.
There are some interesting extras on this DVD. There is footage of the "real" Veronica Guerin making an acceptance speech after receiving an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. This is paired with deleted footage of the same scene from the film. Personally, I found that the footage of Guerin brought home to me the startling reality that I was watching a film about a real person - it is often easy to forget this when you have just watched 2 hours of a glamorous actress onscreen. Unfortunately, this is the only extra that gives us a glimpse of the "real" Veronica Guerin. The DVD could have benefitted from a biography about the woman who formed the subject-matter of the film, and one wonders why something so obvious and important was missing.
The majority of the extras deal with the making of the movie. There is a brief discussion with the movie's producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, as well as a photo journal created by Bruckheimer during filming, with accompanying narration. The DVD also features two commentary tracks, one from director Joel Schumacher and another from writers Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donoghue. The commentary tracks are generally interesting and, if nothing else, show that both the director and the writers had a thorough knowledge of their subject-matter.
Overall, this is a good DVD. I am not certain that it is one that I would add to my home collection, but it is definitely worth a trip to the video store for an evening's entertainment.
| The Movie: |
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7.5/10 |
| The Extras: |
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7/10 |
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