‘Ink’ Skirts Ever Saying Anything Important About the Rise of Rupert Murdoch’s Newspaper

Danny Boyle, who has frequent collaborators and often directs from their scripts, has never been afraid of a meaty story. There’s something more in his era defining zombie flicks, and his stories of drug users to gameshow winners always have layers of political turmoil or comments on societal matters. So it’s even more strange and surprising that in tackling the tale of the rise of a controversial newspaper, Ink skirts discussing anything of any depth.

We are all living in a Rupert Murdoch world, one where the Australian business mogul has developed a colossal media empire that controls narratives and arguably selects America’s presidents. Succession lampooned the empire, making television heroes out of their mess and never shying away from the nightmare of their unchecked control. Earlier in Murdoch’s career, he purchased some newspapers, including the UK’s “The Sun,” a tabloid with an image problem. For the film’s outing, Murdoch is positioned as a volatile businessman trusting his pet project to Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), a snappy new editor with a chip on his shoulder and a penchant for shaking things up.

As adversaries, Lamb and Murdoch butt heads on the right way to develop their trashy paper into a financial success, with Murdoch seeing dollar signs and Lamb seeing growth via his distinct point of view. With his rag tag suicide squad of writers, Lamb climbs the readership ranks getting kicked down only by instances where his paper affects the real world.

Lamb’s work is questioned when presumed mobs boo and hiss at how his smutty paper portrays the word, but James Graham’s script (based on his stage play) seems to have no desire to interrogate that. At some point, in a throwaway moment between scenes, Murdoch encourages Lamb to support the rise of the Tories in the paper which Lamb brushes off since they rely on unions for their printing. Then that moment is immediately sidelined for a more salacious story about a kidnapping. It’s an unfortunate truth that Muriel McKay, whose husband worked for Murdoch, was kidnapped and presumably murdered by members of the M3 gang, but using that as the center of the “what is the role of the media in real world crime” is to sidestep everything relevant to this otherwise relevant story.
Boyle tries to keep it all exciting, using many of his signature shots that will be familiar to fans of his other movies. The entire piece is stunning, with frenetic subway shots, stylized camera tricks, and a stunning scene at a gala that looks like blown out flash photography one might expect to see in print. He formats the first half like a heist movie, with Lamb gathering his gang set to grimy British tracks with frantic cuts. He and cinematographer, Alwin H. Küchler, did something visually very special, but the movie never lives up to that.

And that all makes the generative AI shots all the more egregious. To animate some photography in the film, Boyle used AI and whatever your thoughts on ethics of the tool and his position that it did not take work from actors, it looks horrendous. It won’t take an eagle eye to notice the uncanny and odd motion usually reserved for a weird drop ship company selling a product on Instagram. It’s odd, ugly, and in no way can I imagine it having been worth using to give anything to this film.

Perhaps Ink will appeal to a Mad Men sort of fan base who sees romance in a bygone (lol) era of white men behaving badly and purporting to be the rebels while they wear their suits and wield their power, but that would be a generous comparison since this movie has most nothing to say beyond that. I’m tempted to slaughter it for things like pretending to have a feminist angle by adding a woman character who is an amalgamation of real women reporters just to have her sleeping with her boss yelling things about how women also like sex, or for building up to a climax centered on a nude photo of a woman that just grazes ideas about publicity, race, and nudity as empowerment, but I’m running out of ink.

Ink played the Toronto International Film Festival and is slated for release January 2027