Wrong Is Right

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Wrong Is Right
original movie poster
Directed by	Richard Brooks
Produced by	Richard Brooks
Written by	Richard Brooks
Starring	Sean Connery Robert Conrad Katharine Ross
Music by	Artie Kane
Cinematography	Fred J. Koenekamp
Editing by	George Grenville
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	1982
Running time	117 min.
IMDb profile

Wrong Is Right (Columbia Pictures, 1982) is a prescient black comedy thriller about the theft of two suitcase bombs, featuring the then novel plot conventions of media bias, government conspiracy, and Islamic terrorism. The film, which starred Sean Connery as superstar TV news reporter Patrick Hale, and directed by Richard Brooks from his own script based on Charles McCarry's novel, The Better Angels, was a commercial and critical failure at the time of its release. Most reviews found the film implausible. British reviews castigated the film for its distributor's attempt to tie it in with James Bond in its advertising scheme and retitling of the film, The Man with the Deadly Lens. In France, where the film was called Meurtes en direct, it was compared negatively to Bertrand Tavernier's La Morte en direct, as did Stanley Kaufmann of The New Republic.^[1] The New York Daily News emerged as a champion for the film, Liz Smith calling it "a sleeper not to miss"^[2] prior to its release, and Rex Reed and Kathleen Carroll giving it four^[3] and three and a half star reviews^[4] published a day apart.

The film is also notable for a joke at the end of the movie in which Connery rips off his toupee on camera. Jennifer Jason Leigh has a small role as a girl who is doing a fantasy killing of her parents on national TV (a controversial new recreational activity), and tells Hale that she hopes that her parents are watching, even though she has no particular grudge against them.