A Mighty Heart (15)

Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl, wife of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped and beheaded by jihadists.

Director Michael Winterbottom (The Road to Guantanamo), working from Mariane's book, takes an almost documentary approach to portraying the hunt for Daniel. Keeping the then five-months pregnant Mariane at the centre of events, he catalogues the effort put in by the Journal, the Karachi police and the US authorities to find her husband.

As a filmmaker trying to keep the story moving along, Winterbottom's difficulty is that between the time of the kidnap and its shocking conclusion, everyone was playing a waiting game. The same routine was played out every day - meetings, internet research, the occasional raid on suspects' homes.

It was a time heavy with drama, but that doesn't translate to the screen. Jolie's portrayal of Mariane Pearl is not without its problems, either. Though she dons a wig and adopts an accent to play the French radio reporter, it's never entirely possible to forget one is watching Mrs Brad Pitt, international celeb, UN ambassador and earth mother, playing a part.

These reservations are pushed aside when it comes to the tale's conclusion. Winterbottom handles Daniel's death with the utmost sensitivity, and Jolie reminds us that as well as everything else, she can be a deeply affecting actress.

Playing the saintly Marianne Pearl - canonised by the media after the martyrdom of her journalist husband Daniel - must have seemed like Oscar bait for Angelina Jolie.

The problem is that she has spent so much time developing herself as a brand, that it is now difficult to take her seriously as an actress.

The undoubtedly genuine anguish of Marianne Pearl comes across as simply Angelina Jolie with a funny accent, so the audience never feels anything for her.

The cynic in me might also suggest that the real story here is Daniel Pearl’s. He was the one who was abducted and beheaded, after all. Instead, the film focuses on the hunt for Daniel, but since most of the audience knows what happened it’s hard for director Michael Winterbottom to generate tension.

The film scores heavily with its Karachi settings, which really give a sense of the enormity of the task facing the investigators. The supporting performances - especially Irfan Khan’s chief investigator - are uniformly good, but the film never really grabs the attention the way you feel it should.