Danny Boyle stages the founding of the modern Sun like a tabloid front page: loud, garish, full of Dutch angles and gargoyle closeups, written in a font three sizes too big. Adapted by James Graham from his 2017 stage play, Ink covers Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of the ailing Sun in the late 1960s and his installation of Yorkshire hardman Larry Lamb to turn it into a circulation juggernaut. As origin stories go, this one has genuine dramatic material — class war on Fleet Street, the invention of mass-market vulgarity as a political weapon, the complicity of readers who bought every copy. Boyle commits to the surface energy of that world with real conviction. Jack O'Connell as Lamb is the engine the film runs on. Muscular, pugnacious, and lit from within by working-class resentment, he makes Lamb's appetite for disruption feel earned rather than cartoonish. It's the kind of performance that carries scenes Boyle underserves — and there are several. Guy Pearce's Murdoch is a more careful study: less panto monster than you might expect, increasingly queasy at Lamb's provocations even as he funds them. It's a coolly composed reading that resists easy demonization, though it also sidesteps the more interesting question of what actually drives Murdoch, a question Brian Cox's Logan Roy answered with more corrosive precision. Claire Foy plays Jules, a fictional composite of women's-page editors of the era — a structural character designed to register the coming tide of sexism rather than resist it. It's a thankless role made competent by Foy's commitment, but the film uses her less as a person than as a moral thermometer. The officer-class Fleet Street establishment is rendered with real period texture: expense-account dinners at Rules, salary offers written on paper napkins and slid across in silence, the rank smell of institutional comfort protecting mediocre men. Against this, Lamb and Murdoch make a strange alliance — both outsiders who want a slap at the club that excluded them. The film's structural problem is the McKay kidnapping. In 1969, Muriel McKay — wife of Murdoch executive Alick McKay — was abducted by men who mistook her for Anna Murdoch; she was never found. It's a real horror embedded in the film's black comedy, and Boyle doesn't quite know how much weight to give it. The film imagines Lamb running sensational coverage of the kidnapping — he would never have dared if the victim were actually Murdoch's wife — and then, after the tragic outcome, doubling down on Sun-sationalism and introducing Page 3. The implication is that this was the primal scene: media exploitation of grief as business model, the seed that grew into Fox News and the social media manosphere. That is a serious claim. The film doesn't earn it. The comparison to Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) that the source review floats is apt and unflattering to Ink. Kurosawa's film understood that the crime and the media system were the same story. Boyle keeps them adjacent. The McKay affair deserves either a more central dramatic role — the spine the moral argument runs along — or honest excision. As staged, it functions as a third-act intensifier that the film then steps around, letting Lamb shrug off guilt and the narrative shrug with him. The movie ends up being as lenient toward its subjects as it accuses the Sun of being toward sensation. That's either a very sophisticated formal choice or an unresolved structural problem. The film doesn't seem to know which. What Ink does deliver — consistently and with real energy — is the texture of a specific media ecosystem: the class dynamics of print journalism in transition, the smell of ink and sweat and institutional change, the way vulgarity becomes a class weapon when wielded by the right hands. If you come for the performances and the period atmosphere, you'll leave satisfied. If you come for the moral reckoning the film keeps promising, you'll feel the gap where it should have been.
