BEFORE: Well, that was an action-packed film yesterday, with lots of dinosaur-based thrills. Let's keep the action rolling with a spy film from last year. Toby Jones carries over from "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom".
THE PLOT: An undercover MI6 agent is sent to Berlin during the Cold War to investigate the murder of a fellow agent and recover a list of double agents.
AFTER: Well, this one really got away from me, with all of its twists and turns and double-crosses. I had to read the Wiki plot summary to find out what really happened, underneath all the changes. Maybe you'll have better luck than I did following it.
Here's what I know - a very sexy British agent named Lorraine (which seems like a contradiction of sorts, that's not a very sexy name at all...) is sent to Berlin, just days before the end of the Cold War, to get her hands on a very special list (secret code name: "The list", where do they come up with these names?) that has the identities of agents on both sides. So I get that, everybody wants this list, and it exists in two forms, one is a guy who memorized it.
So everybody wants either the list or this guy, but the guy just wants to get himself and his family across the Berlin Wall, from the East side to the West side. Which was no easy task back in those days, when East Berlin was controlled by the Soviets. And it's bitter irony to see so many agents going to such trouble to either get this guy across the border (or prevent that) when all they had to do was WAIT THREE MORE DAYS for the wall to come down. Come on, didn't they have any clue that this was going to happen? Seems like an awful lot of fuss and bother for no good reason, or is that just me?
Sure, there's action a-plenty, and a big sequence in the middle where Charlize Theron's character takes out like 10 or 12 guys, one by one, with guns and knives and judo and such. But what does it all add up to in the end? And way too much time-jumping, as we toggle between the things happening, and the debriefing taking place 10 days later where everyone's talking about the EXACT SAME THINGS that we just saw happening. Was this framing device really necessary, it added nothing to the story, and in most cases, didn't even explain what was happening any better, it was just more talky-talky that slowed down the action.
Look, this is why I hate time-jumping so much - the film opens in Berlin, with an agent getting killed, then flashes to "Ten Days Later" where people are talking about the agent getting killed, and we see the agent who was sent to investigate, she's giving her side of the story. So then we flash BACK to one day after the agent was killed - but we were JUST THERE, we could have continued forward narratively from that point, there was no need to flash ten days into the future just to return to the past a minute later. All this did was make the film even more confusing than it was before, and it was already pretty confusing.
OK, so she's a lesbian, or at least swings both ways. Big deal, which is to say, OK, great, but we should probably be at a point in our understanding of other humans where this should NOT be a big deal. Right? What does it say about me that I was more excited by all the 80's songs in this film than the sex scenes?
And hey, James McAvoy is still having a great year, this makes eight appearances for him so far in 2018, and there are still a lot of chances for more, though nothing else with him is on the docket. But we'll be seeing him mentioned for sure in the year-end countdown - it probably didn't hurt that he was in (essentially) the same film three times over, and I watched all three of those.
Also starring Charlize Theron (last seen in "North Country"), James McAvoy (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), John Goodman (last seen in "Trumbo"), Til Schweiger (last seen in "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), Eddie Marsan (also last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Bill Skarsgard (ditto), Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Star Trek: Beyond"), James Faulkner (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Sam Hargrave, Roland Moller, Johannes Haukur Johannesson, Daniel Bernhardt, Barbara Sukowa (last seen in "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing"), with archive footage of Kurt Loder, Ronald Reagan.
RATING: 4 out of 10 tiny bottles of Stoli
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