Beatty good and bad

Praise to him for this film, but ... the character - or Beatty himself - was entirely too "young" and light-hearted, too lacking in gravitas, to be playing the radical, passionate Jack Reed. He had a kind of dopey, what-me-worry aspect that just didn't fit in with the seriousness of the cause(s) he was promoting, and it made him appear very weak in contrast to Keaton's outspoken character and screen-worthy performance (even though she did pout and nag a lot). Beatty's finest moment was his train confrontation with his Communist panel, where he tells them that if the Party destroys, nullifies, and/or poisons people's deepest loves, it kills the Revolution. In those few seconds, I believed that Beatty was Reed, or at least a reasonable facsimile. But that one scene doesn't absolve all Beatty's other, frankly, rather wimpy performance.