The Messenger

A new movie review from The Movie Snob

The Messenger (B-). The Dallas Morning News gave this movie a glowing review, so I hurried on out to see it opening weekend. It was good, but far from great. Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster, X-Men: The Last Stand) is back in the States after being injured in Iraq, and for the last three months of his enlistment period the Army assigns him to the task of notifying the next of kin of soldiers who have been killed (whether in combat or in accidents). He is paired up with a veteran notifier, Capt. Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson, Zombieland), who is a recovered alcoholic and perhaps a touch crazy. The notification scenes really work--I've read that Foster and Harrelson weren't told what was going to happen in those scenes, so their reactions would be more authentic. But the rest of the movie, such as Montgomery's tentative relationship with a war widow (Samantha Morton, Code 46), generally didn't feel all that authentic to me. So it's kind of a mixed bag of a movie. And is it just me, or does Ben Foster's voice sound just like Michael Douglas's (Romancing the Stone)?