'State of Play' (PG-13)(out of four)

A rumpled Russell Crowe, a buttoned up Ben Affleck, a Bambi-eyed Rachel McAdams and a trash-talking Helen Mirren set the tone for "State of Play."

Part "All The President's Men" with a dash of "The Pelican Brief," this political thriller is based on a BBC miniseries of the same name, which ran in 2003. Keeping to the same plot, a journalist gets too deeply enmeshed in problems of a politician: The problem, however, is that the politician is an old friend. Extramarital affairs happen, lives connect and disconnect, and the reporter does whatever it takes to get the real story in print.

The film opens with a succession of killings -- three people are dead in the first 15 minutes. Crowe as hard-boiled reporter Cal McAffrey, drives to one crime scene down by the Washington Beltway singing an Irish song, tapping his steering wheel and downing a bag of Cheetos in a beat up Saab. (A public relations executive played by Jason Bateman later in the movie compares it to a riding mower.)

McAffrey, a curmudgeonly reporter from the fictional Washington Globe, is on his way with his trusty notebook and pen, to get the story on how a bicyclist and purse snatcher were picked off by a sniper's bullet. Meanwhile, a woman is struck by a subway train. It's soon discovered that she had been having an extramarital affair with a high-profile politician. Suddenly, the pieces of these seemingly unrelated deaths begin to fit together and McAffrey is snooping around. Moviegoers should start to feel like they are cogs in the wheels of an old printing press being spun and churned in different directions.

Speaking of old printing presses, the depressing demise of the good old ink-stained newspaper is nailed into the industry's already half-closed coffin repeatedly throughout "State of Play." As a former newspaper reporter who cut her teeth in a busy Washington Globe type newsroom, it was sorely depressing to sit there and watch the old guard get beaten to a pulp.

"She's hungry, she's cheap and she churns out copy every hour," Mirren's Chanel-suited editor says to McAffrey about the web writer from her glass catwalk office. Welcome to 21st century news reporting, she nags at Cal.

Yet the reality of this movie remains the stuff of Hollywood sets. When the hungry online cub reporter, Della Frye (McAdams as a modern day Lois Lane), has a story break right before her very eyes, and with the newspaper's Web site being touted throughout the movie as the monster that's taken down print, Frye breaks down and runs to Cal outside of the shooting scene for a bear hug. Any reporter worth her salary, cheap or not, should've wiped away the tears and taken her trusty laptop to nearest Starbuck's to churn out the story. "First on scene" stories like those are what any journalist -- online, television or newspaper reporter -- waits their whole lives for.

For those that don't care about the inconsistencies in the inside baseball workings of a newsroom, "State of Play" weaves a believable story, and even sets off a few bells and whistles about past and present Washington politics.

The fictional root of all this conspiracy is a company that is noticeably akin to headline-making real-life companies Blackwater and Halliburton. In the original British miniseries, the big, bad corporation was an oil conglomerate; here it's a defense contracting company in the middle of the privatization of U.S. Homeland Security who is using unsavory practices to ensure it makes its money.

If it all sounds very complicated, it is, but very well done in the hands of director Kevin MacDonald. Meanwhile, casting changes after the Writer's Guild Strike of 2007 put Crowe in this lead role in place of Brad Pitt, and Ben Affleck as a stand-in for Edward Norton. Affleck seems uncomfortable in the suit he wears as the ambitious Congressman from Pennsylvania -- and the actor and Crowe never rev up any chemistry, so it's difficult to believe that the two were college roommates.

Crowe's spark, however, with Robin Wright Penn as Collins' cheated-wife, is natural, and the short scenes between the two are some of the best. Ditto with Crowe and Mirren, who scrap like two British relatives who use arguing as a form of congeniality (Crowe, we know, Australian, but he hides the accent to play a scrappy Irish-American reporter in this one).

"State of Play" is a dying breed, just like the newspaper it represents. Its characters actually seem to care about dirty politics and uncovering the truth. The film may make moviegoers ruminate for just a little while about two things: who is running their government, and the extinction of an industry that once really did care.