To me, this movie is perfection.

Awesome Movie

As Good As It Gets

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Anyone who knows the story of Watergate is typically fascinated by "Deep Throat", the government informant who tipped off Bob Woodward and the Washington Post about not only the cover-up but about Nixon's operatives who tried to sabotage political enemies. This film attempts to expose who Mark Felt was and why he became Deep Throat. The good news of the film is a tremendous performance by Liam Neeson and a solid supporting cast. The not-so-good news is the lack of juicy moments which were sacrificed. I was a bit unsatisfied by film's end.Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, will go down in history as possibly the most famous informant in US history. The question has always loomed: why did he break ranks and leak information to the press? Concerning these two questions, the film succeeds in answering them more or less. Felt was caught between a hard place and the Nixon administration. That hard place was Watergate in which the FBI was the de-facto investigative body. After J. Edgar Hoover died while still serving as FBI director, the White House nominated L. Patrick "Pat" Gray as acting director and put his name forward as a candidate for permanent director. Gray was simply a pawn of the White House and the Nixon administration. The different federal agencies are supposed to act independently to prevent collusion and consolidation of power. Gray came from the military, and Nixon probably believed by putting Gray in the director's chair rather than someone who had decades of experience at the bureau, like Felt, the new administrator would carry out Nixon's bidding. Gray did things as ordered by the White House not realizing the FBI does not submit to the President. Mark Felt also believed he should have been nominated as the new director instead of an outsider like Gray. With these forces acting upon him, Felt relents and engages in behavior which he had never done in 30 years: leak important information to the press. Where the film fails, sadly, is in one of the most important and fascinating aspects of the whole Watergate episode: his relationship with Bob Woodward. The film shows only two phone calls and one garage meeting with Woodward. In "All the President's Men", three meetings are portrayed with Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat. A missed opportunity. I wanted to experience on-screen how Felt and Woodward met and how their relationship developed. This is the juiciest aspect of Felt's story which was compromised. Another side story explored in the film is Felt's daughter who joined a commune. While interesting, I found that tangent less compelling than his relationship with Woodward which was given very little screen time. Overall a bit of a disappointment.

I didn't wink through out the whole movie! Great actors, the plot, the tension! Made we want to read about Watergate!!

I watched this at home on DVD from my public library. It is timely as almost the same thing is happening in the Washington today. It complements the 1976 movie "All the President's Men" which focuses on the role of the Washington Post reporters.In 1972 several man were caught breaking into the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate hotel. As the FBI began to look into it there was evidence that the men had ties to the White House and to Nixon himself. Liam Neeson as Mark Felt, a 30-year FBI man who was the Associate FBI director under Hoover, gets involved. Then Hoover unexpectedly died but Felt was not appointed as interim FBI Director. Maybe that helped him decide to do what he did.Stifled by orders from the White House to complete the Watergate investigation quickly, Felt used the power of the press, purposely leaking information to a reporter he had known for some time, by use of public pay phones or clandestine meetings. Eventually pressure cracked the cases, many of Nixon's staff went to prison, Nixon himself resigned in shame.Neeson is great in this role, some think the movie moves too slowly and is too long but I think it was ideally made. I was a young adult in 1972, I remember Watergate and Nixon's resignation. This movie is welcome to fill in who became known as "deep throat."

The story of Mark Felt, who under the name "Deep Throat" helped journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the Watergate scandal in 1972. Mark Felt suffers from a thin plot and a boring and predictable direction and story we've seen before in better films. (0/10)