Battle In Seattle

Charlize Theron's plot strand weakens the storyline. Photo / Supplied for Timeout

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

It's a riot. No really, it is.

The protests against the 1999 World Trade Organisation ministerial conference in Seattle might seem longer than a decade ago. Being both pre-millennial and pre-9/11, the events which inspired this engaging but flawed docudrama feel like they belong to much quainter times.

Certainly, the anti-globalisation protests depicted here may have sparked - in the US at least - a new era of activism and helped the mainstreaming of ecological issues.

But the film itself, necessarily to work as a drama, focuses on the raw friction between the protesters and the city's authorities as well as some caught in between.

It's delivered as an ensemble-driven multi-narrative, reminiscent of the likes of

Crash

with characters' paths criss-crossing in city blocks fogged by tear-gas and pepper spray.

And at street level, Irish actor-turned-director Stuart Townsend certainly impresses, intercutting his action with actual news footage and generating a sense of the tension and panic which must have gripped the city at the time.

He frames his storytelling from the side of the protestors focusing on the trio of Jay (Henderson), Lou (Rodriguez) and Django (Benjamin from OutKast), who all have acceptably pro-environment credentials, the film studiously avoiding any anti-capitalist rhetoric while decrying the anti-corporate anarchists as the window-smashing lunatic fringe of the conflict.

Unfortunately, the story and character strands weaken with its more melodramatic sideshows. One involves pregnant department store salesperson Ella (Theron, Townsend's partner) and her cop husband Dale (Harrelson). The unbelievable scene when Dale reconciles with Jay after an earlier violent encounter threatens to capsize the whole movie. So does the storyline concerning local TV reporter Jean (Connie Nielsen) who undergoes a change of professional

perspective that is this film's greatest contrivance.

As well as our boy Henderson acquitting himself rather well, then-WTO director general Mike Moore gets a cameo via television footage of his "doomed to succeed" opening address - one made to a few delegates who actually made it past the protest blockade to the conference.

As a political statement it might be too much, too late. But as film it's still a moderately exciting storming of the barricades.

Russell Baillie

Cast:

Martin Henderson, Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Rodriguez, Andre Benjamin

Director:

Stuart Townsend

Rating:

M (violence, offensive language)

Running time:

99 mins