Movie Review: Miss Sloane

I'll admit that I wasn't a huge fan of Miss Sloane at the beginning of the movie - it moves at a lightning-fast pace, which normally is good, but in this case it made some of the plot and characters hard to follow.

Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is a lobbyist and a shark. She has a fantastic track record, and she doesn't let anything—or anyone—get in her way. Her current project is lobbying for a bill for gun reform, and she's intent on getting enough senators to vote for the bill so that it passes, thus making it harder for people to procure guns. She doesn't really have a personal life, instead paying escorts to fulfill her needs, and she focuses all of her energy on lobbying. When it looks like the gun bill might not pass, however, Sloane must take extreme measures to make sure it does, hurting some of the people she works with in the process.

Chastain was fantastic in this movie, which was unsurprising to me - she's great in everything that she's in. Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Free State of Jones) had a good supporting part as well, as one of Chastain's associates, whom we later find out something surprising about. The rest of the supporting cast includes a large list of A-listers, too, including John Lithgow, Sam Waterston (Law & Order), Mark Strong, Alison Pill, and Jake Lacy.

Yes, see this movie, just be aware that it moves fast and it will require your full attention to "keep up" with it. It reminded me of a long episode of Scandal a bit, actually, with Chastain in Kerry Washington's role, even though Washington isn't a lobbyist in that show (more of a "fixer," as she puts it, who fixes people's problems). Once I figured out the pace of the movie, it was a little easier to keep up with it, and there's a twist at the end that I didn't see coming, as well.

Miss Sloane is in theaters today, December 9th, and is rated R with a runtime of 132 minutes. 4 stars out of 5.