Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)

6/10
How did they take such an explosive subject matter and make such a blah movie out of it? The problem with Spotlight is that it's a movie on rails, never once deviating from the track that takes it from start to finish. There's nothing in here that you don't expect to happen, in fact, even less happens than what you might expect. In the course of uncovering the central scandal, the Spotlight team runs into almost no obstacles, no resistance, and anything that does arise as a potential obstacle to overcome (e.g. Mark Ruffalo's character getting to the courthouse in time) feels like a screen-written artifice. More cynically you could call this movie "3 Men and 1 Woman Doing Their Jobs" because that's exactly what it felt like watching.
One interesting angle (whether or not certain members of Spotlight themselves were implicit in the cover-up) is brought up and brushed aside almost immediately. It leaves enough of an impression but I wish it was probed with a bit more detail, to give even more of a sense of a community truly and collectively looking the other way.
Seen through the lens of other, similar movies nominated for Academy Awards, Spotlight is closer to me to a thing like The Imitation Game from last year. It gets up on the screen, tells its story, all the actors do their jobs well, and then it leaves without making any significant impact or stirring up any real emotion. It was fine, but not much more for me.