“Has too much fun with the darkness of its subject matter, risking that a more ignorant audience may take away the wrong message from it.“

“People need stories.”

Sensationalistic, salacious, scandal-ridden. The British tabloid press is notorious, as it seldom goes for the head, but instead aims firmly for the heart. Or rather, the gut. Or the balls. One rag stands tall amongst its ruthless peers: The Sun, founded and owned by Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. In Danny Boyle’s latest film Ink, the British filmmaker follows the early years of the newspaper that eventually led to rightwing media like Fox News and others that don’t care much for the truth, and instead try to manipulate the thoughts of their viewers and potential voters for the conservative values that Murdoch adheres to. As loud and disruptive as its subject matter, Ink is an entertaining but shallow film about the birth of a movement that has a large part of the world in its tentacles half a century later, and stumbles into the pitfall of enjoying the ride too much.

The setting is October 1969, a posh London restaurant. Australian millionaire Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce, played with flashes of his Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist) meets with British newspaper editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell). Lamb was formerly employed as sub-editor by the Daily Mirror, and holds a personal grudge against his former chief editor. Murdoch has just bought a bottom-of-the-barrel newspaper, the laughing stock of Fleet Street, Britain’s publishing heart since the 1500s; he wants Lamb to turn it into a success as its chief editor. Lamb thinks he is mad, but it’s an offer he can’t really refuse (although he does negotiate for a Jaguar on top). Murdoch wants Lamb to shake Fleet Street up; instead of reporting the news, The Sun should create the news. All people want is stories, is his credo, and whether they are true is of less importance (an idea the film mirrors in the small scar on Lamb’s forehead, for which the film gives several wild origin stories). Lamb starts recruiting a team, which includes the woman he is having an affair with, Jules (Claire Foy), as the editor for the women’s section. Other cast members include the likes of Blake Harrison, Patrick Kennedy, and Christopher Fulford; their characters are archetypes that are mostly defined by which section of the paper they edit, and the occasional quip they get to throw in.

The first editions under new management are not a great success, although sales have slightly ticked up. After a brainstorming session with his team, Lamb finds a new direction for the paper: give the people what they want. Give it loud, give it without scruples, and give it without the traditional stiff upper lip. The Sun causes scandal after scandal, but with each one the sales curve, which Lamb keeps close track of in his office, shows a further incline. Then the wife of Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde), Rupert Murdoch’s closest confidant, is kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity. Lamb pushes on, sensationalizing the case despite it endangering McKay’s wife: all morals go out the window of his office. It ruffles Murdoch’s feathers and alienates Jules, but Lamb has become unstoppable, intoxicated by the success of the paper and his obsession with beating the largest newspaper in circulation: his former employer, the Daily Mirror.

At its heart, Ink is little more than an origin story in which a rag-tag team of misfits somehow launch the biggest newspaper of the UK. You are supposed to root for them, but in the back of the viewer’s mind is of course the knowledge that this led to Murdoch’s rightwing media empire, and said empire creating a stranglehold on a large section of the American news-consuming public. What is notable is that the film to some extent absolves Murdoch. Sure, he likes the sensationalism and shaking up of the establishment, but where Lamb spirals out of control in increasingly bad moral choices, Murdoch is hesitant about some of Lamb’s wildest ideas. Lamb, brilliantly played by O’Connell like a man addicted to his success, is the film’s center that grows darker and more corrupted with every scandal, leaving morals by the wayside to the abhorrence of his co-workers, mostly personified by Foy’s Jules. Though she cooperates in creating a monster, she remains the moral heart of the story until she can’t take Lamb’s antics anymore. Her resignation speech to her writers is the highlight of the film, and should Ink get any awards traction, Foy surely is one of the first to go on people’s ballots.

Boyle’s flashy style fits the subject matter, and he doesn’t hold back in Ink. As disruptive as The Sun is, so is the relentless bombardment of slanted Dutch angles. The filmmaking is loud, as it should be for a portrayal of a sensationalistic newspaper and its madman chief editor. Visual pyrotechnics abound, and some are firmly on the nose (a repeated fever dream of Lamb and Murdoch on an out-of-control train is a nice visual metaphor, but the idea was already distilled from the text). It makes the film move at a steady, feverish pace, and combined with some well-placed British humor, Ink is a film that will surely find an audience. But as entertaining as it is, the film can’t really hide its shallowness and lack of true criticism of its subject. A tacked-on montage at the end shows what Murdoch and, according to the film, predominantly Lamb’s hand has wrought over 50 years later (suspicion of traditional news sources, ‘fake news’, and the rise of rightwing extremism, fascism, and the manosphere, all things Murdoch’s media empire has certainly fomented). This montage is included almost as an afterthought, and is not enough to warrant a ‘both sides’ label. In a sense, Ink falls into the same trap Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street did: it has too much fun with the darkness of its subject matter, risking that a more ignorant audience may take away the wrong message from it. As a portrait of the sinister arc of Larry Lamb, an almost literal black sheep, it only succeeds for those who bring in enough background knowledge to frame it within the right context.