BEFORE: Well, we were supposed to go out to Long Island this weekend, so my wife could buy smokes, and that usually means a nice lunch at a Chinese buffet or maybe a BBQ restaurant, but I was out drinking on Friday night, then I had to sober up and stay awake during the overnight rainstorm to check the backyard drain every hour, so water wouldn't pool up and come into the basement again. So Saturday we both slept late, then got out to Home Depot to buy more sand to make sandbags for the backyard basement door. Also went to BJ's and bought just a few things, because honestly I don't think you save money by shopping at a wholesale club unless you've got four kids to feed. (Sure, the portions are larger, but the prices are higher, too, there's nothing for sale there under $11, so in the end I think you don't save much by buying in bulk, and for us buying larger portions just means things are going to spoil before we get around to eating them. I'll get some grape juice and ice cream there, but otherwise I prefer to buy regular human-sized portions of things.)
Today we made four more sandbags with the sand we bought yesterday, so we've now created a barricade that we hope will keep the water from coming in the house during flooding events, and all rainstorms these days seem to come with flood warnings, and now I think we've bought ourselves just a little more time to clear the drain when it gets clogged up with leaves. Still, during every rainstorm I'm going to have to check the drain before and during, at least until I know for sure if the sandbags work. But now I'm exhausted from carrying two 60 lb. bags of sand into the backyard, and then putting four 30 lb. sandbags into place. That's it for me today - time to rest up for the work week.
Laurence Fishburne carries over from "John Wick: Chapter 4".
THE PLOT: Veteran CIA agent Henry is reunited with his former colleague and lover Celia in order to close an eight year old hijacking case.
AFTER: Wow, the synopsis for this film on the IMDB is incorrect, it says that Henry is reunited in Vienna with his former colleague and lover. Totally wrong, this reunion takes place in California, it's a big part of the plot that the restaurant where they meet is in wine country, and they prominently mention Carmel-by-the-Sea, which is the small coastal California town where Clint Eastwood served as mayor, at least for a short time. (This was shot in London, but exteriors were filmed in California.). Does someone from the production company or distributor maybe want to fix this? Or does nobody even give a shit, which is a bad sign?
Another bad sign is that this film went straight to AmazonPrime - that's not necessarily a kiss of death, because Amazon has a ton of money and I'm sure they can afford to buy great films, but when a film is made for theatrical release and then doesn't make it to the movie screens and goes straight to streaming, well that says something about the distributor's confidence right there. OK, so there was a pandemic going on in 2021 and theaters just weren't open yet, I'll give you that, but still, Hollywood was sitting on a lot of films that year, things got re-scheduled for 2022, but this one just got dumped on to Amazon, it should tell you something.
This is another split-timeline movie that keeps jumping around between the past and the present. Actually there are three time periods depicted, the past hijacking event from eight years ago, Henry interviewing Celia in the present (again, in California, not Vienna) and from maybe a few weeks or months prior to that, Henry interviewing Celia's former mentor, Bill Compton, in London (also not in Vienna). Sure, I understand why they show us three timelines at once, it's so we don't learn about everything all at once, they give us all the information in little doses and then it's up to us to solve the mystery regarding who in the CIA might have given information to the terrorists, and what EXACTLY went wrong with the hijacking.
But it just doesn't WORK here as a format, because we already know that the response to the hijacking went south. The case would be CLOSED if everything went well, and Henry wouldn't still be investigating it, eight years later, to find out who the mole was, or if there was a mole. And I think we learn pretty quickly in the film the fate of everyone on the plane, including the hijackers, so there's really no mystery to preserve there. So you might as well just show us the whole hijacking scene first, let that whole situation play out, and then fast-forward eight years to get to the second part. That would be a lot more coherent, and infinitely more watchable - there would be less work for the audience to do to try to put the scenes in the proper order.
But then here's the other problem, the hijacking scenes are EXCITING. Even though we mostly see the hijacking from the CIA agents' P.O.V., and those scenes are mostly agents in the bureau talking about what to do next, instead of, you know, actually DOING it. Show, don't tell, that should be the general rule. Two of the three parts here are ALL tell, not show, and then part of the hijacking plotline is also all talky-talky, that doesn't add up to a very exciting combination. They could have done the hijacking scenes as all flashbacks, and therefore not as a split-timeline, but something tells me that wouldn't have worked either. My advice to the screenwriters would have been to scrap the whole split-format and start over, maybe focus on JUST the exciting timeline, and see where that takes you. If you want to then add a half-hour at the end, with a subtitle that reads "Eight Years Later", you can then do the boring interview or debrief thing, and at that point, maybe reveal who the mole was. That might have worked, maybe, but for sure this bouncing back-and-forth in time thing didn't work.
Anyway, I'm not sure that the CIA would treat their agents this way, even if they did suspect them of being corrupt or giving information to terrorists. Wouldn't you think that the CIA would be more likely to bring an agent up on charges, and terminate them from their position, rather than, umm "terminate" them as in kill them? Sure, they've done black ops in other countries and they've probably assassinated people when required, but are they that ready to kill their own agents? That's a bit too James Bond, perhaps, and feels more like what you see in movies than in real life, and movies should reflect real life, not the other way around. Spy movies have taken so many liberties over the years, however, that we've come to think that being in the CIA is a lot like being James Bond, when it's probably much more paperwork and less field work than we all think.
I can't say any more about the plot without risking a spoiler, but then once you know what happens at the end, you can look back at what happened at the beginning, and then you may realize that this whole premise makes a lot less sense than you think. What it reminds me of is a film from 1987 called "No Way Out", starring Kevin Costner. Costner plays a Lt. Commander at the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, and the whole film is an investigation into the identity of a KGB sleeper agent within the CIA. Costner's character is at different times leading the investigation, and also being framed as the sleeper agent himself - the plot is that twisty, and very confusing. Eventually, I think maybe even in a post-credits scene, there's a final twist and the sleeper agent's identity is revealed, and anyone who walked out of the movie when the credits started to roll walked out before seeing the answer, so they saw one movie, and people who stayed in their seats saw a different movie. Simply NOBODY is talking about this movie any more, which makes me wonder how many people know how it really ended. But once you know, you can look back on the rest of the film and then realize that when you consider this new information, things really wouldn't have played out the way they did.
Anyway, there's probably a rule against CIA agents having relationships with each other, or there should be, and this film neatly details WHY that rule exists. I'm sure it still might happen, but if they're properly trained agents who follow the rules, it shouldn't. Same goes for giving in to the demands of terrorists, we have now all agreed that we should not do this, no matter what the cost - because if you do that even one time, then they'll all come to expect it, and this will lead to more terrorist incidents. So we all have to be ready to say "no" to terrorist demands, even if that comes with a terrible sacrifice.
I'm not even sure what the title means - it's like nobody knew how to properly market this story or distribute it, so they just gave up.
Also starring Chris Pine (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Thandiwe Newton (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Corey Johnson (last seen in "Radioactive"), Colin Stinton (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Ahd Kamel, David Dawson, David Bedelia, Jonjo O'Neill (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Abdul Alshareef, Oscar Coleman, Cali Gayle, Joshua Lacey (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Gala Gordon, Dar Dash (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), MIchael Shaeffer (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Faton Gerbeshi, Derek Siow (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Moe Idris, Karina Wiedman, Alexander Devrient, Abdi-Fatah Ali, Orli Shuka, Anna Jones, Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny").
RATING: 4 out of 10 empty tables at the restaurant
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