The new "All the King's Men" is terrible

I saw this out of a stubborn disbelief that the cast, crew, and subject matter could really produce as bad of a film as the reception seemed to indicate. The trailers looked bad, but I just had to see for myself...

...and I wish I hadn't. This is a pretty terrible film, a completely missed opportunity. It feels like half of the story is on a shelf in some editing room, and fails to convey what all the fuss was about with Huey P. Long to begin with.

The cast, despite their pedigree, is the biggest problem. Sean Penn is pitifully miscast, playing Willie Stark as a politician version of "I Am Sam"; all gyrations, drawls, and goofy faces. Jude Law is the sad sack staight man who lacks any spark of life. Anthony Hopkins pops in to play a Louisiana judge with a British accent, and on and on.

The entire cast feels as though they've never been to the south in their lives, and seeing as Zaillian cast a bunch of Brits and Yankees, that's a very real possibility. The accents are uniformly terrible (Mark Ruffalo is the worst), if they even attempt them at all.

Bad, bad movie. It's even worse when your 30 minute documentary on the real Huey Long is about 50 times more informative and compelling. Anyone else sign up for this punishment?

It was just another of several half-baked subplots to me. Winslet isn't even a factor until the film's more than halfway over. It's a decent scene, but too little too late for me, easily drowned out by everything else around it.

It's even more ridiculous when the downfall of Huey Long was 1000 times more interesting. Zaillian never gives you a good idea what his downfall is about. Stark's obviously turned into a jerk, but nothing else is fleshed out. They hint at corruption, but never explain it. Also, Stark has this drastic, 180 about face the second he gets elected. We get no sense of being corrupted, he just becomes this raging asshole the second he gets behind the big desk. It feels lazy.

Penn is why this movie fails, IMO. The real Long gave off an aura of down home likability, Penn most certainly does not. His speeches are laughably bad. He was closer to Chris Kattan's incoherent Louisiana lawyer Saul Forrester on SNL. Watching the documentary on the real Long, I honestly don't get what they were thinking by casting Penn. The whole time I'm thinking they should have gotten Billy Bob Thornton or John Goodman, someone like that.