Favino acts pretty well, even though the makeup and prosthetics are kind of distracting. The story is interesting in name only, because there's a fascinating concept in the idea of a politician upheld to a standard of purity that no other politician follows, but the movie doesn't go forward with that, it just presents it. The actual history is not described, only referenced, because the movie was about the former protagonist of this history after the history already happened. It wants to be an introspective character study and also a historical period piece on Tangentopoli, but it pretty much fails as both. The dialogue is not very natural, it feels like we're witnessing the main character delivering aphorisms on the unfairness of politics and life for 2 hours. It's not an entertaining movie, it's a pedantic movie that presents something and doesn't really question it, doesn't go anywhere. The acting was fine (although the young guy was pretty bad at times). The pacing is atrocious, my attention slipped away multiple times and I feel like I lost nothing. The "dream sequence" at the end was cheesy as hell, completely out of place, tries to establish a simplistic character narrative for a character that, in the actual history of it all, was just a component of a larger system. This is one of those biopics that settles on mentioning topics and relies on the fact that those topics are interesting instead. It's a movie that was probably made thanks to the star power of the main actor, the director and the historical interest, but it's utterly unwilling to engage the viewer in any meaningful way, other than "hey, remember that complex historical event? Wow, right?". The Wikipedia page for the history of Mani Pulite was more entertaining than this movie, enough said.
