Steven Zaillian gets almost nothing right in his remake of 1948 Best Picture-winner All the King’s Men.  It’s woefully miscast to the point of out-and-out distraction, and it’s lensed like it takes place in North Dakota rather than Louisiana.  There isn’t an iota of information given to viewers indicating how much time passes on screen.  And the focus of the film is flat-out on the wrong character.  When Sony Pictures yanked Men off of the competitive year-end release calendar in 2005, suspicions were aroused, but it isn’t until now that the rest of the world understands what the studio was up against last Fall – they opted to run for the Award Season endzone with only DOA duds Rent and Memoirs of a Geisha tucked under their arms.  Lest anyone think Men is a loving post-Katrina ode to Louisiana’s legendary political corruption, this puppy has been in the can (and on the shelf) for over a year.

Men is, at least as its trailer suggests, about the rise and fall of a fictitious Louisiana politician named Willie Stark (Sean Penn) who, in Robert Penn Warren’s source novel of the same name, was clearly modeled after Huey P. Long.  As the film opens, Stark is mayor in a small town in the northern part of the state, and he’s coerced into running for Governor just to split the so-called hick vote in an attempt to make things easier for the big city incumbent.  When a newspaper reporter (Jude Law) points this out to Stark, the candidate goes bonkers and starts giving highly animated speeches to his fellow hicks (if it wasn’t for James Horner’s score explaining Stark’s speeches were “inspirational,” he’d have sounded a lot more like a “lunatic”).

Stark is elected in a landslide, and quickly begins to make major moves toward taxing the oil and utility companies in an attempt to raise money for some massive public works projects that will benefit the poor by creating a ton of post-Depression jobs.  This doesn’t sit well with the “old boys” in the state, and Stark is (quickly?) brought up on impeachment charges.  This is when Men shifts its focus from the highly charismatic Penn/Stark character to the highly boring Law/Jack Burden character.  Burden was fired from his newspaper job for being too pro-Stark during the election, and now works for the Governor.  His latest assignment is to dig up dirt on a judge who could represent the swing vote in the impeachment hearings.  The trouble is that the judge (Anthony Hopkins) is a very close family friend of Burden.

You might, at this point, be wondering how Academy Award Nominee Kate Winslet fits into the picture.  She doesn’t, really (and why is Winslet touted more than Academy Award Nominee Patricia Clarkson in the film’s publicity materials?), and neither does anything else in the second half of Men.  In a way, it’s almost fun to watch a movie with this much promise and star wattage get as goofy and misguided as Men does.  In another more accurate way, it’s blindingly disappointing, especially when you consider I could have been home watching the season premiere of America’s Next Top Model instead of waiting for the final scene of this turkey to unspool while somehow managing to not laugh out loud at it.

Men’s casting is a joke, with three of the top four credited stars hailing from the UK and making no attempts at the chunky Noo Awlins accent (but is that any worse than James Gandolfini, who gives it a shot but ends up sounding like a shortbus gangster?).  Law never comes across as anything but British, and both Hopkins and Winslet call their performances in from the old country like a pair of robots.  On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Penn, who chews scenery, light fixtures, the craft service table, and anything else he can cram into his maw.  His over-the-top take on the character made me think of Jim Belushi impersonating Joe Cocker on Saturday Night Live.

2:08 – for an intense sequence of violence, sexual content and partial nudity