"You are a scared, heartless, horrible little man!" screams Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) to his long-term companion J Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio), the first director of the FBI, in Clint Eastwood's bloated biopic, focusing on this monster's rise to power and his closet homosexuality.
DiCaprio tries his best – sometimes under prosthetics that make him resemble Orson Welles's elderly Citizen Kane – as the commie basher but cannot rescue this dreary film, which also stars Naomi Watts (underused) as Hoover's wife.
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