Review: How the news was broken, written in ‘Ink’

Jack O’Connell completes his villain era “trilogy” (preceded by Sinners and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) with a chilling, real-world portrayal of newspaper editor Larry Lamb. Backed by Rupert Murdoch’s (Guy Pearce) millions, Lamb and a team of London journalist outcasts turned the failing The Sun newspaper into the first modern tabloid thanks to a hefty dose of sex, violence, and freebie giveaways. Following the paper over the course of a year, we see Lamb find nothing is off the table and grow increasingly soulless thanks to an excellent portrayal from O’Connell, who’s so charismatic that you want to root for him and get swept away into the madness until it’s too late to pinpoint where it all went wrong. 

Director Danny Boyle brings a similar bag of tricks to Ink that he deployed in 28 Years Later: unconventional camerawork, rapid-fire editing, and a mix of real and recreated archival footage and still images. The cumulative effect is electric and captures the feeling of being there in that moment; this is no stuffy period piece by any means. 

For American audiences not familiar with The Sun’s many, many controversies, but who know how much our culture has been shaped by Murdoch’s Fox News, there may be some disappointment that Boyle and screenwriter James Graham (adapting his own book) could have twisted the knife even further into these greed- and revenge-driven men. Even so, this is a very entertaining, and often horrifying, look at a year that changed the world for the worse.