I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Just wow brings out a thrilling experience and sheds light on the truths that have been masked.The truths about the WMD program and US invasion on Iraq,The abuse of power by the high government officials and how they prevaricate from the right questions.

(Some Spoilers) True story of the efforts of the Bush/Cheney Administration's underhanded and lying efforts to convince the American public that Iraq was building nuclear weapons to use against its neighbors in general and the USA in particular. It turned out that the man that was sent to find out about that threat the former US Ambassador to Gabon Joseph Wilson, Sean Penn, proved just the opposite and his life as well as that of his wife's CIA district chief Valeria Plame, Naomi Watts, would never be the same again. The movie shows just how desperate the Bush Administration was in getting a war going on in the middle east against Iraq and went as far as openly lying to the American people, in Bush's infamous 2003 State of the Union Address, to get it going.It's when Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times about him not finding any evidence of Saddam's Iraq having gotten 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from Nijar his wife not him became "Fair Game" by the Bush Administration and outed as a CIA operative. That not only put her and her family including her husband Joseph Wilson and children lives in danger but all those she worked with as well. Treating the Wilson's as if they were the enemy the media for the most part overlooked what the Bush/Cheney gang got the country into by lying it into a war that is still going on now 13 years later that has turned out to be the biggest both military & financial disaster in US history!It was little compensation for both Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame that in the end they were proved innocent as well as accurate in all their assertions of the lies and duplicity that the Bush Administration, and it's flunkies in the US media, pulled off to get us into a war that has cost the lives of thousands of US servicemen and women as well as hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The only good thing to come out of all that is that the American people have gotten a bit smarter in them not blindly willing to believe everything that top government officials, from the President on down, tells them at face value. Which is why the now Obama Administration utterly failed 10 years later in 2013 , despite all its lying and underhanded efforts, to get us into a war with Syria by claiming that the country's President Assad was using poison gas against his own people much like were we told about Iraq's Saddam that proved, in both cases, to be totally false. Where in one case-Saddam-the public fell for it and in the other case-Assad-in didn't.

It seems to me that they had to fill the first half of the movie with a bunch of Plume's CIA operations - though these really had little to do with the Plume affair and were probably made mostly up - because the Plume affair itself didn't have enough meat/drama to make a movie from. Or maybe it did - they rather rushed through most of the later stuff.On the other hand, I appreciated that they reminded the viewer of the affairs' core issue in the scene near the end in which Plume's husband is talking to students and points out that they all know his wife's name at the expense of knowing the key sentence of Bush's speech. It was a bit heavy handed but it drove home the movies' point quite well.

As others have noted, the simple fact that this film is based upon a true story makes it the success it is. If it were a work of fiction, FAIR GAME would be nothing more than another very forgettable thriller. Yes, there are some of the inevitable oversimplifications, and the film is obviously subject to some bias by the fact that its primary sources are books written by the protagonists, retired ambassador Joe Wilson and his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame. All the same, it captures the complexities of this very serious breach of security and miscarriage of justice about as well as it possibly could.Fine acting by two of Hollywood's finest, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, along with a very realistic script, contributes a great deal. The quality acting by many of the supporting cast, particularly David Andrews and Liraz Charhi, is also a big plus.FAIR GAME shows some easy to overlook parallels--as well as anti- parallels--between the administrations of George Bush and Saddam Hussein. After watching it the first time, it's worthwhile to go back and watch key portions (if not the entire film) with the very illuminating audio commentary of Plame and Wilson.Along with a gripping storyline, FAIR GAME has a great deal to offer about the very nature of truth vs. untruth, the need for transparency in government, and the ease at which government officials can often circumvent the law. The biggest downside is that FAIR GAME is bound to become dated over time and will probably be of little interest 10-20 years from now.