BEFORE: Completing a Denzel Washington triple-play - I think I've done 2 Denzel chains before over the course of the project, but honestly it's getting tough to remember that sort of thing.
THE PLOT: A young CIA agent is tasked with looking after a fugitive in a safe house. But when the safe house is attacked, he finds himself on the run with his charge.
AFTER: This is a tough one to rate, especially compared with something like "Ricochet". A lot more stuff happened in "Ricochet", but so little of it was believable. This one appears to come from the reality of modern espionage - waterboarding and all that - but when you boil it down, look past the action to the general plotline, you might realize that there's no "there" there.
Oh, things take place - there are car chases, shoot-outs, and good ol' fisticuffs - but it's one of those cases where somebody forgot to give the plot a valid middle. It opens strong, and there's a big finish, but so much of the middle is delay, delay, delay. Once I realized the pattern - safe house gets compromised, fight the bad guys, escape, find the next safe house, repeat - I could see I was getting gamed. When the lead character's instructions from his superiors kept turning out to be "get to a safe place, contact us again in 12 hours" I felt like I was being strung along.
The most interesting part was seeing the spy business through the eyes of a rookie - he's been trained, but his experience mainly has involved babysitting a safe house, keeping it stocked and ready for the next agent who needs a place to check in, hide out and crash for the night. Said rookie is thrust into the main action when a veteran rogue agent turns himself in, and the opposition (whoever they are) tries to prevent that from happening.
There are some very vauge plot-points here, many things are kept non-specific, perhaps to allow the audience to imagine the details. What information does this agent have? How/why did he go rogue? Why, exactly, does everyone want to either kill him or take him in? Even when some of the specifics are revealed, they're still pretty nebulous.
Instead, the main focus seems to be on whether experience trumps youth, aka age over beauty. The two leads are forced to work together, when they're not trying to kill each other, at least - demonstrating that you can't ever really trust anyone in the spy game, not the Hollywood spy game, anyway. Nothing here rubbed me the wrong way as a "fake-out", but there were still a few too many reversals.
NITPICK POINT: Waterboarding is generally used to gain necessary information from UNwilling prisoners. It was a little strange to have a character say "I'll tell you what you want to know" and then have him get waterboarded. What's the point? Did they not believe him? At that point, couldn't torturing him make him LESS likely to give up his information, not more?
NITPICK POINT #2: When things go wrong in South Africa, the two top agents fly in from (presumably) Washington DC to take control of the situation. Really? You don't have anyone else out in the field who might be able to handle things? Can't you fly someone in from Egypt or Libya or something? What part of "time-critical situation" are you failing to understand?
Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Green Lantern"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1"), Vera Farmiga (last seen in "The Manchurian Candidate"), Sam Shepard (last seen in "All the Pretty Horses"), Ruben Blades (ditto), Robert Patrick (also ditto, that's a little odd...).
RATING: 5 out of 10 security codes
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