Once the Oscar-winning, critic-baiting enfant terrible of Hollywood, Oliver Stone’s position in the industry has gone from illuminating grandmaster to embarrassing grandfather with a string of curiously ill-advised disasters. Alexander, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Savages are the works of a director depressingly out of touch and uncomfortable with his landscape, far from the zeitgeisty provocateur he used to be.

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On paper, the story of Edward Snowden provides Stone with ample, angry opportunity to regain his footing and restore faith in his ability to provoke and challenge. He’s utilised two books for the film, by Russian professor Anatoly Kucherena and Guardian journalist Luke Harding, and even consulted with Snowden himself to ensure maximum authenticity. But doing your research will only get you so far as it becomes clear, mere minutes into the film, that Stone is quite clearly not the man for the job.

The film exists within two different timelines: there’s NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) holed up in a room with documentary film-maker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewan MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) and then layered over the top, there are the events that led him to this juncture. From his military stint to joining the NSA to slowly uncovering, and helping to develop, tools that breach the privacy of American citizens, his story begins to catch up with the situation at hand, as one of the decade’s biggest news stories is unleashed on the world.

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It’s been such a torturously long time since Stone was a relevant film-maker and with the story of Edward Snowden, he’s been handed the motherlode: an urgent and divisive tale centred around a hot button issue that still continues to rage on. But in what must be either reliance on dated sensibilities or a wish to appeal to the widest audience possible, he gives us an unbearably Hollywoodised retelling of a narrative that requires no gloss whatsoever. Snowden’s early ascent within the CIA feels like an extended training montage produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, even down to Nicolas Cage’s improbable and ridiculous role as a teacher.

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But the miscast of Cage is nothing compared to the staggeringly bad performance by Rhys Ifans as Snowden’s CIA mentor. It’s a bizarrely hammy and entirely, hilariously misjudged career lowpoint for the actor but his take on the material is oddly reflective of how Stone sees things. There’s little room for nuance and naturalism in a story that’s inarguably full of both, with events presented to us in an alarmingly straightforward manner, watered down for date night at the multiplex. Similarly, the romance between Snowden and girlfriend Lindsay (Shailene Woodley, trying her darndest) becomes far too prominent, a calculated move to bring in the younger female demographic that overestimates our involvement in what’s presented as a formulaic dynamic. Their initial spiky political conversations soon devolve into regressive tropes: he works too much and she nags too much.

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For a film that takes place within the last 13 years, it often feels as if it were made in the mid-90s, with TV movie music cues and a string of outdated stylistic choices managing to make a story of the moment feel like a thing of the past. While David Fincher managed to make coding feel suspenseful in The Social Network, Stone’s attempt to sex up typing is essentially blasting out loud techno music over the top of it. Virtually every directorial choice is aimed at making Snowden’s life seem more conventional and it results in the majority of scenes feeling like a lifeless construct.

The only real saving grace is Joseph Gordon-Levitt who, once you get past the distractingly well-observed voice, gives an understated and entirely committed performance. He grounds the hammier scenes and elevates the flat moments, showcasing previously untapped depths and making us wish the film around him were quite as effective.

The problem with using the production of Laura Poitras’ documentary Citizenfour as a framing device is that it ends up being a constant, damning reminder of how this story has already been told so perfectly. In his dry and uninvolving dramatic take, Stone has made a film aimed at breaking out Snowden’s story to the masses but it’s made with such limpness that a swift read of his Wikipedia page will prove far more exciting.