Jonah Hill and James Franco square off in the muted drama-thriller True Story, about a disgraced New York Times journalist who interviews a man accused of brutally murdering his own family. Interesting to a degree but not interesting enough, True Story isn't without some merit but lacks the bite it so desperately needed.

Hill plays Michael Finkel, who wrote the memoir upon which this movie is based. He does a decent enough job in the serious role, though to say he gets more than skin deep into the character would be pushing it. Limited by the material and screenplay, his performance can best be described as dutiful.

The same can be said for Franco, who does his best with what's given to him but delivers a wholly unremarkable character in Christian Longo, a disappointing outcome given that he's essentially playing a sociopathic monster who, while seemingly charming and intelligent, butchered his wife and stuffed his young children into suitcases. By no means does the character need to bear any similarity to the one portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, but True Story fails to heighten its villain to anything more than instantly forgettable.

True Story is marketed as a cat-and-mouse game between two men, but really, the Rupert Goold-directed film is nothing more than a by-the-numbers portrayal of the two men's interactions in prison. Some of their scenes are well done--piece by piece the movie is perfectly fine, but as a whole there just isn't a lot to it--but as time progresses the tension between the two never escalates.

If you read about the true story behind True Story, you'll realize that the movie is more about Finkel's observations of Longo than Longo himself (and his crimes), the latter of which being a much more compelling core than what is emphasized here. But even as a character study shown through Finkel's eyes, the movie fails to get into either man's head, leaving us with nothing more than varied Jonah Hill facial expressions and Franco trying to act creepy.

Goold and co-writer David Kajganich's embellishments don't help either. While I can't say for sure whether these elements were fictional, a couple scenes were glaring in their failings. In one, Finkel attempts to give his notes to the authorities to help their case, an action that seems so against journalistic principles it's hard to imagine the man actually even considering doing such a thing, let alone following through with it. And another, in which Finkel's wife (played by Felicity Jones) meets with Longo, is so theatrical and absurd it ripped me out of the movie entirely.

True Story is not a terrible movie, it just isn't a very interesting one--a sad fate given the subject matter at hand.

Review by Erik Samdahl.