Wrong is right (1982)

Wrong Is Right (Columbia Pictures, 1982) is a prescient black comedy thriller about the theft of two suitcase bombs, featuring the plot conventions of media bias, government conspiracy, and Islamic terrorism. The film, which starred Sean Connery as superstar TV news reporter Patrick Hale, and directed by Richard Brooks from his own script based on Charles McCarry's novel, The Better Angels, was a commercial and critical failure at the time of its release. Most reviews found the film implausible. British reviews castigated the film for its distributor's attempt to tie it in with James Bond in its advertising scheme and retitling of the film, The Man with the Deadly Lens. In France, where the film was called Meurtres en direct, it was compared negatively to Bertrand Tavernier's La Mort en direct, as did Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic. The New York Daily News emerged as a champion for the film, Liz Smith calling it "a sleeper not to miss" prior to its release, and Rex Reed and Kathleen Carroll giving it four and three and a half star reviews published a day apart.

The film is also notable for a joke at the end of the movie in which Connery rips off his toupee on camera. Jennifer Jason Leigh has a small role as a girl who is doing a fantasy killing of her parents on national TV (a controversial new recreational activity), and tells Hale that she hopes that her parents are watching, even though she has no particular grudge against them.

Based on Charles McCarry's 1979 novel The Better Angels, Wrong is Right is set in a near future in which violence has become something of a national sport and television news has fallen to tabloid depths (a significantly bigger stretch in 1982, when the film was released.) Star Sean Connery plays Patrick Hale, a globe-trotting reporter with access to a staggering array of world leaders. As the film opens, he has ventured to the Arab country of Hegreb to interview his old acquaintance, King Ibn Awad (Ron Moody). Awad has learned that the President of the United States (George Grizzard) may have issued orders for his removal; as a result, Awad) is apparently making arrangements to deliver two mini-nuclear devices — each about the size of a small suitcase — to a terrorist, with the intention of detonating them in Israel and the United States, unless the President resigns. In the intricate plot that unfolds, nothing is quite the way it seems, and Hale finds himself caught between political leaders, revolutionaries, CIA agents and other figures, trying to get to the bottom of it all.