It wouldn't be an overstatement to call The Last Thing He Wanted a disaster in terms of comprehensibility, narrative drive, dramatic arc, and the simple cinematic goal of taking an audience from point A to point B in a coherent and artful way. Show moreĪ surprisingly messy offering from the talented director of Mudbound, Dee Rees, this movie fails in almost every way possible. A funeral, a divorce, an unhappy adolescent daughter, and a bout with breast cancer are all thrown in. She has sex with a congressional adviser, or maybe a CIA agent ( Ben Affleck). Elena gets stuck in Costa Rica, laying low as a hotel maid, waiting to be rescued by the American government. Her father, Dick ( Willem Dafoe), who left her 20 years before, shows up with memory loss and asks her to step in for him in an arms deal in Nicaragua. Her paper stops covering the war, but the implications are nefarious. It seems as if the government, run by Ronald Reagan seeking a second term, his military and intelligence agencies, and numerous private persons, used cocaine sale profits to smuggle arms to the Contras to bring down an inconvenient violent government. Hard-bitten American journalist Elena McMahon ( Anne Hathaway) relentlessly covers the carnage in Central America, and like many war correspondents, can't forget the innocent dead she's seen when she returns to the States. government using taxpayer money to send weapons to Contras battling the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. THE LAST THING HE WANTED derives from Joan Didion's 1996 novel about plotting and covert arms deals undertaken by the U.S.

The last thing he told me review