This made-for-TV movie is just awful. Liev Schreiber can't carry a film at this
point in his career, and the script doesn't try to make it easy for him. There’s no sense of Orson Welles that comes through
here. Welles does one thing and then
another, has one opinion and then another, lacks passion, and verbalizes
thoughts like “we all love in our own way,” which the film then blithely ignores ignores in terms of character action though repeats verbally. RKO 281 is a waste of some very good talent.
As part of a series around Welles and Citizen Kane, though, RKO 281 offers a few small rewards. For one, it's fun to spot Ross' restaging of some of the newsreel footage that's used in The Battle Over Citizen Kane. And though the picture quality isn't great in the edition of RKO 281 that I saw, the lighting and sets were rich. Good visuals redeem the movie a little.
But it's disappointing Ross isn't able to pull off a more cohesive portrait of Orson Welles here. Instead, RKO 281 leaves that task to another project.
