The massive protest that shut down the World Trade Organization’s 1999 Seattle meeting was a fairly significant historical event that the average American probably doesn’t know anything about. So it’s good the feature film “Battle in Seattle” was made to at least get the incident on people’s NetFlix queue radar.
Too bad it couldn’t have been made better. Writer-director Stuart Townsend, best-known as the Irish actor who lives with Charlize Theron, takes a kaleidoscopic, how-this-affected-individuals-involved approach that’s often pretty contrived.
And the finished product, which has languished in release limbo for some time now, plays choppy, jumping from superficial personal stories to City Hall crisis mismanagement to hypocrisy within the corporation-dominated WTO meetings to a whole lot of tear-gassed streets. Scenes are played passionately, but are too cliched and diffuse to generate much audience engagement.
In one of the few scenes made for irony, a Doctors Without Borders representative (Rade Sherbedzija) makes a pitch to give free essential medicines to Third World countries while chaos swirls outside. The film’s default position is to fall back on anti-capitalist rhetoric whenever dialogue and drama grow too banal.
On the plus side, Townsend shows a knack for mixing news footage with staged scenes, and creates some good riot sequences with limited extras and not much of a budget.
He got a fairly decent cast, too. Theron, of course, who plays the pregnant wife of a Seattle cop (Woody Harrelson, who looks incredibly right in Kevlar armor). And Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez and Andre Benjamin, all of whom bring a little extra to the activist stereotypes they portray.
Ray Liotta and Connie Nielsen are not up to the demands of fully embodying the conflicted mayor and TV reporter they’re respectively saddled with.
