The film starts with rookie CIA officer Matt Weston (Ryan
Reynolds) house-sitting a secure location in South Africa. It has seen nothing
of interest, indeed not a single person, in the twelve months he’s been
stationed there. When rouge agent Tobin Frost (Washington) is brought in for
questioning, the excitement comes in greater quantities than the rookie could
have ever expected. A small group of heavily armed, villainous men shoot their
way in and almost catch Frost. But Frost talks the rookie into fleeing. The
captive seems awfully calm about all this, even when Weston asks him to get
into the trunk of the car. The younger man is under the impression that he is
taking a dangerous captive to his superiors. The rouge master spy sure seems to
be getting his way, though.
On the run from these unknown attackers and trying to
coordinate with the CIA, Weston and Frost have an antagonistic partnership in
which only one man really seems in control, even when he’s unarmed and
handcuffed. Washington exudes a twinkling confidence and a gravity of intention
that makes the early parts of the film a mostly competent diversion. It’s
nothing we haven’t seen before, but it proves that, done well enough, the old
tropes can be used to fine effect now and then. Reynolds mostly stands by and
lets Washington dominate each and every scene, but he manages to hold his own.
After unmitigated disasters of starring roles in the likes of Green Lantern and The Change-Up, it’s nice to see Reynolds sink back into an ensemble
for a film that’s just barely north of mediocre.
The movie’s about men pointing guns, cars going fast, and
intense phone calls in shadowy Langley conference rooms. Back at CIA
headquarters we have the prickly Brendan Gleeson, the soulful Vera Farmiga, and
the grizzled Sam Shepard talking strategy and ordering underlings around while
they contemplate how to put an end to this situation. It goes without saying
that they aren’t all on the same page and, in a page right out of the Bourne playbook, there’s a sense that
they might not all be playing for the same team or with the same rules. If
you’d guess that there’s going to be some ulterior motives to be revealed
towards the climax, I’d say you must have seen a lot of the same thrillers that
I have.
My early tolerance for the brisk, efficient action,
including a decent car chase, turned into dismay over the lifeless
confrontations that follow. By final few fight scenes I could rarely make heads
or tails of the action. Instead of grooving with a visceral abstract chaos, the
filmmakers just threw up blurriness and hoped the Foley artists did their job
well enough. Weston, clutching a gun, edges around a corner. So does Frost. So
do some bad guys. Where are they in relationship to each other? Who is about to
encounter whom? Who knows?
As the double-crosses fall into place and the movie zigs and
zags its way to where I figured it was headed all along, my interest fell off. When
the true villain is revealed, I practically shrugged. When crucial, damaging
information about the intelligence community may or may not be leaked, I found
myself without a rooting interest one way or the other. As the plot tries to
thicken, it just gets thinner and thinner. I found myself without a reason to
care. I found myself wondering why the setting of the climax is given so many
intermittently loud buzzing flies, which made me think of Emily Dickinson. I
looked up the poem when I got home. “I heard a fly buzz when I died / The
stillness round my form / Was like the stillness in the air / Between the heaves of
storm...” When you’re sitting in a dark theater watching a dumb thriller of low
ambition and find yourself thinking more about recalling a poem than the action
on screen, you know the movie has lost you completely.
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