(Some Spoilers) True story of the efforts of the Bush/Cheney Administration's underhanded and lying efforts to convince the American public that Iraq was building nuclear weapons to use against its neighbors in general and the USA in particular. It turned out that the man that was sent to find out about that threat the former US Ambassador to Gabon Joseph Wilson, Sean Penn, proved just the opposite and his life as well as that of his wife's CIA district chief Valeria Plame, Naomi Watts, would never be the same again. The movie shows just how desperate the Bush Administration was in getting a war going on in the middle east against Iraq and went as far as openly lying to the American people, in Bush's infamous 2003 State of the Union Address, to get it going.It's when Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times about him not finding any evidence of Saddam's Iraq having gotten 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from Nijar his wife not him became "Fair Game" by the Bush Administration and outed as a CIA operative. That not only put her and her family including her husband Joseph Wilson and children lives in danger but all those she worked with as well. Treating the Wilson's as if they were the enemy the media for the most part overlooked what the Bush/Cheney gang got the country into by lying it into a war that is still going on now 13 years later that has turned out to be the biggest both military & financial disaster in US history!It was little compensation for both Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame that in the end they were proved innocent as well as accurate in all their assertions of the lies and duplicity that the Bush Administration, and it's flunkies in the US media, pulled off to get us into a war that has cost the lives of thousands of US servicemen and women as well as hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The only good thing to come out of all that is that the American people have gotten a bit smarter in them not blindly willing to believe everything that top government officials, from the President on down, tells them at face value. Which is why the now Obama Administration utterly failed 10 years later in 2013 , despite all its lying and underhanded efforts, to get us into a war with Syria by claiming that the country's President Assad was using poison gas against his own people much like were we told about Iraq's Saddam that proved, in both cases, to be totally false. Where in one case-Saddam-the public fell for it and in the other case-Assad-in didn't.

Naomi Watts and Sean Penn were magnificent as Valerie Plame Wilson and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and the t-i-g-h-t film by Director Doug Liman (who also did "The Bourne Identity"), is s-e-n-s-a-t-i-o-n-a-l! The DVD has awesome reality to it and includes much actual material extras from Valerie and Joe - who stood up against hideous White House lies - particularly over invading Iraq - and who both deserve much credit as national / public heroes. Geo. Bush, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove all could have gone to jail for their acts and their lies r/t Iraq (and r/t the Wilsons) - as could quite a few others. Scooter wound up as the sole 'patsy'.Scooter Libby interestingly, was sentenced to a few years in jail, a couple in paroled supervision, and about 400hrs. of community service and he was fined a quarter million (not a problem as he was worth as much as 25 million) - but Bush kept him from going to prison. He was / is the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since John Poindexter, the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the Iran–Contra affair. My theory is that like with Nixon, Libby was made the "fall-guy" partly because he was Jewish. Nixon had failed to shift much blame for various things onto Kissinger, but clearly had planned to and even attempted it a few times.

With regards to the above quote, all these years later, we know how empty those words were. The Iraq War was an unnecessary tragedy. The Bush administration was neither seeking peace nor striving for peace. They were out for the oilfields. And woe to anyone who got in the way of the project.Enter Joe Wilson (Sean Penn.) Wilson was a U.S. ambassador sent to Afirca on a classified mission to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. Wilson came to the conclusion that it wasn't happening, and he submitted his report and then watched in disbelief as the United States continued on the path to war with Iraq, using the story of uranium buys in Africa as justification. After going public, the Bush Administration declared war not only on Iraq, but on Wilson's wife - CIA operative Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts.) The title "Fair Game" basically seems to mean that Plame, Wilson and the children and families became fair game, to be torn down and destroyed in order to continue to justify the war in Iraq. It's a frightening story of people at the highest levels of power playing with people's lives and careers, deliberately setting out to destroy those who oppose them, and adopting a definite "take no prisoners" mentality. I suppose those who supported Bush and the Iraq War will have denounced this as leftist Hollywood propaganda. I thought it was a quite credible portrayal of what goes on behind the scenes at the top. (9/10)

It seems to me that they had to fill the first half of the movie with a bunch of Plume's CIA operations - though these really had little to do with the Plume affair and were probably made mostly up - because the Plume affair itself didn't have enough meat/drama to make a movie from. Or maybe it did - they rather rushed through most of the later stuff.On the other hand, I appreciated that they reminded the viewer of the affairs' core issue in the scene near the end in which Plume's husband is talking to students and points out that they all know his wife's name at the expense of knowing the key sentence of Bush's speech. It was a bit heavy handed but it drove home the movies' point quite well.