peteg's blog - noise

More slow cinema from director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond (also jointly responsible for First Cow (2019)). Once again on the Oregon Trail. In a couple of sittings due to a lack of grip.

The script is a bit weak with the usual tropes: an encounter with a native American divides the settlers in the obvious way, disaster strikes but even before that hunger and thirst are close. The men and women are divided along gender and every other line. And then it just evaporates.

This leaves the stellar cast with not enough to do. Bruce Greenwood (Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997)) plays a coarse outdoorsman who is charged with leading the group to the promised land. Will Patton, in his least creepy role ever, has Michelle Williams as his second wife. She's the actual lead, or at least the most interesting. Shirley Henderson forms half of another couple, and similarly Paul Dano.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "More an experience than a story." A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Reichardt had already spent a lot of cinematic time in Oregon. Dana Stevens: "there's something about [Williams's] character that doesn't sit quite right." I agree: she never seems to bear the risks she runs.

A sequel to Gettin' Square (2003) that nobody asked for, much like T2 Trainspotting (2017). David Wenham starred (of course) and produced. He's hard to hate. Chris Nyst wrote and Jonathan Teplitzky directed both. Timothy Spall, Freya Stafford, Sam Worthington and Richard Carter do not return; Carter's character got recast (Bob Franklin).

It's a nostalgia kick. The plot is very woolly, the jokes very stale, the confected slang trying. The retroconned backstory moved things from the zany subtropical crime scene toward Australiana soap-and-away. The reheating of scenes from the original, specifically that court scene, are cringe. Redemption! They try to reflect multiculturalism via asylum seekers, Syrians and Maori (hey that's Indira!). Sombre, elegiac: so much death. Mere TV.

Luke Buckmaster. Sandra Hall. Both indulge the local product.

Maggie Cheung completism. Released the same year as Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996).

Mainly this critiques the sad state of French and American filmmaking both directly and via the reductive meta navel gazing mechanism of freshening up a French classic of the silent era (Les Vampires (1915)) with a foreign actress (Maggie). Auteur Olivier Assayas loved the conceit so much he remade this very movie with Alicia Vikander in 2022.

Some of it is amusing (I did enjoy Nathalie Richard’s efforts as the costumer) but there's a tad too much of the French self-referential tradition that I lacked the background for. That made it mostly about Maggie for me: she cops some stick for starring in Police Story (1985) with Jackie Chan. An interviewer lays it on thick by championing Bullet to the Head (1990) and John Woo's masculinity. Does she think Alain Delon is much chop? Even his repetition and inarticulate slagging-off of arthouse cinema is of a piece with the rest of it: heavy-handed and stale.

The best parts were Maggie notionally playing herself, unaffectedly out of her element in Paris but speaking enough French to bring into question her ignorance of the other proceedings. She made a great catwoman and perhaps Hong Kong should have paid tribute to Hollywood with a Batman remake.

Janet Maslin: sardonic. Stephanie Zacharek let her youthful exuberance run away with her.

At Alice Springs Cinema, cinema #2, front row, 18.30, almost just me. Directed and co-written by Justin Kurzel (The Order (2024), etc.). Nick Fenton is credited as the other co-writer. It seemed to take an age to get a release (on 2025-07-12?) after its premiere at MIFF 2024 last August.

There are three interleaved storylines. One has Warren Ellis engineering the soundtrack for this movie in Paris and is essentially padding. I guess it's sorta fun hearing him speak French and wondering what the sound engineer makes of his Australianisms. And hear him layering sounds, some of which reminded me of Ben Frost. Another lays out the purpose of the Ellis Park home for trafficked animals, perhaps too briefly. (The park of that name in Adelaide (where the best speed in Australia may or may not be sold) and the famous rugby field in Johannesburg do not feature. Kurzel shows that he is no David Attenborough, or Errol Morris for that matter.) The main thread tracks Ellis on a visit to Victoria, presumably in 2023 as he was recording Love Changes Everything (2024) with the Dirty Three, released after their Australian tour in 2024, through to a visit to the titular park in Sumatra and the passing of his father in December 2023.

The early camerawork during the return to Ballarat was not promising but at some point things settled down enough for me to enjoy Ellis's unaccompanied violin in spaces that had meant something to him as a young man. I'd forgotten that he'd released a memoir (Nina Simone's Chewing Gum (2021)) and therefore lacked the context that may have made that motif more significant than twee.

The homepage for Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary suggests that Nick Cave is also putting in some cash (personally and via their Goliath Enterprises vehicle). Cave himself appears but only in archival footage. No other musician speaks except Ellis's father; Ellis tells us that his father wrote songs by opening a book of poetry and singing it to whatever chords he was playing, a process that is clearly inapplicable to Ellis's wordless music. At some point Ellis says to the prime motive force for the Park, Femke den Haas, that he doesn't want to be "that person" (elsewhere: Bono) but it struck me that throughout the whole movie, he is that person. This indulgence is smothered by worthiness and redeemed by Ellis's ability and willingness to trust and muddle forward, and be increasingly open about himself. Even so I was looking at my watch after the first hour.

I avoided the coverage before I saw it. Luke Buckmaster saw it at MIFF 2024. He seems to get (but doesn't spell out) the Heart of Darkness aspect of the journey to Sumatra. Indigo Bailey talked with Ellis recently. He might be right that cynicism doesn't get you anywhere. Andy Hazel was on the shoot (?) and I'd've preferred to have seen what he wrote about. Andrew Dominik on Ellis: "He appears to be letting it all hang out, but he’s not really telling you anything about himself." Kirsten Krauth: the through line is trauma. It could've should've been Fitzcarraldo (1982) but Kurzel is not Herzog either. The filmmaking process was somewhat therapeutic for Ellis but did not prevent a year-long breakdown between initial shooting and completion. An incomplete portrait. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Kurzel as did many others. And so on.

Kindle. Unlike Clune's earlier non-academic output (Whiteout (2013), Gamelife (2015)) I didn't get this one, his first novel. Once again we're in the suburbs of Chicago, it's high school, and fifteen-year-old Nick-our-narrator is starting to have panic attacks after the separation of his parents. He readily falls in with a bunch of cool kids via his underdrawn best mate and new girlfriend. The putatively helpful high-culture artefacts (authored or proximate to Oscar Wilde, Giotto, Bach, etc.) aren't described in a way that helped this reader understand how they helped Nick; things are not exactly real but they're not very magical either.

Clune's technique of repeating things in the small is not so effective here; I think it was intended to evoke the process of thinking and perhaps I was spoilt by his and Catherine Lacey's mastery of a decade ago... or maybe it only works a few times. He's far better at the things between people such as the hilarious encounter Nick has with a shrink who only offers proforma treatments. Things get a bit cult-ish (Ian is transparently unhinged and dangerous). The foreshadowing made Nick's character somewhat incoherent; he often wants to just exit (a desire even more dominant these days) but sticks around for reasons unknown. The social circle falls apart for reasons unspecified.

Unsatisfying.

Goodreads. Kaveh Akbar (Martyr! (2024)).

I always enjoy listening to George Miller chatting about his life philosophy (he's regularly on the ABC) but am generally less enthused by his movies (Mad Max (1979), the premise of Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), etc). Apparently I saw this one before but I don't remember.

This time around I felt like Roger Ebert must have felt when he finally understood David Lynch via Mulholland Drive (2001): the relentless action of the first movement is all too much and yet when things slowed down I felt that every moment spent on the plot was wasted. The reason is that Miller does a huge amount of character development through interaction and not dialogue. And fashion, let's not forget that. This must be Nicholas Hoult's finest performance. Shot by John Seale. #182 on the IMDB top-250 list. What a blast.

The dreck that Florence Pugh makes me watch. The main problem here is that she's so much better than everything else on the screen; perhaps it is time she took a leaf from Clint Eastwood's playbook and sunk her MCU winnings into her own production company.

This movie's purpose is to get a team together, much like earlier MCU instalments, Suicide Squad (2016), Justice League (2017), etc. Getting in the way is the need to acknowledge general eye-rolling exhaustion with this stale property. The writing room's solution was to smoodge Pixar's Inside Out (2015) with a Cube (1997) multiverse into something very emo. The superman thing initially put me in mind of Matthew Goode's Ozymandias in Watchmen (2009) but really it's a humourless reheat of Iron Man 3 (2013) or Age of Ultron (2015) with a dash of that Guardians (2014) zaniness. So, not entirely fan service, just mostly fan service.

On the civilian side we get Geraldine Viswanathan (same-same as she was in Drive Away Dolls (2024): a relatable Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha everywoman type?) playing baddie Julia Louis-Dreyfus's personal assistant. The Kierkegaard regurgitation is cringey, and there's way too much "exposition" with "finger quotes". Were these scenes from an aborted Seinfeld reboot?

It took me a while to recognise Lewis Pullman; he has the same eyes and sheepish grin as his dad Bill. Perhaps he'll be President one day! (Later I found out he was in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)). The homage to The Matrix was lame. Settling his personal (brain chemical) issues with violence was lame. Not being asked to factor huge numbers was lame. So much lame.

Manohla Dargis. I did not enjoy David Harbour's showboating. Flo's doing her own stunts, just like Tom Cruise ... therefore Mission Impossible beckons? Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue. Hannah John-Kamen really did get a numpty of a character.

I've seen a few of Miyazaki's movies (Howl's Moving Castle (2004), The Wind Rises (2013)) but somehow not this, his masterwork. The art is gorgeous. I can't say I grasped the whole mythos; I think it's a Japan-ified Wizard of Oz. There's a small homage to it and to Pixar as the young girl makes her way up a path. The humour is fantastic. #31 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2012. Alice in Wonderland. Kamaji is a great invention. (It was the hopping light pole that I took as a homage to Pixar.) This "ma", the emptiness between actions, is exactly what George Miller omitted. Elvis Mitchell made it a Critic's Pick. Apparently now a stage production.

I dodged this movie at the time but just now got suckered by the New York Times placing it at #18 on their list of the best movies of this century. I am not a fan of the director/co-writer Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men (2006), Gravity (2013), Roma (2018)) which made it hard to indulge. The other co-writer was his brother Carlos Cuarón.

This is adolescent male fantasy stuff though I grant that the pervy camera ecumenically reduces everyone to sex objects. It's a pile of cliches: the mateship of two horny young blokes from Mexico City is put to the test by an older, marginally more mature but similarly oversexed woman from Madrid who has her reasons to get loose and enjoin them to a road trip to a paradisaical beach. The narration aims for the quirkiness of contemporaneous Amelie (2001) but adds little. There's not one but two lame Fight Club (1999)-esque manifestos. The only thing anyone ever thinks about or discusses is sex, so much so that they're getting it on in public.

Roger Ebert: four stars and a lengthy summary. There's a semi-serious critique of Mexican culture/politics/etc. bubbling along underneath! — what I saw I dismissed as mere colour. His main point was it goes where American movies could not. Elvis Mitchell.

Kindle. There is opportunity in the current chaos! But does anyone think that Australia's leadership can grasp it?

Against Mishra he provides a solid, brief bibliography that deserves a scrape. I now wonder if Fred Kaplan gave Des Ball his due (Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?, Adelphi Papers 1981). He does not cite Daniel Ellsberg or his pithy take, that nuclear weapons are used all the time, as threats. On the other hand I'm sure Mishra would argue that the extended peace in Imperial Europe and the Americas up the World War I was underpinned by extreme violence in the colonies.

Excerpted everywhere but there are not many reviews yet. White is extensively touring; for instance he spoke with Allan Behm at the ANU recently.

Written and directed by Rolf de Heer. It took many goes to get through, mostly because there's nothing of interest here unlike some of his previous features like Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie's Country (2013).

The lack of dialogue and the overly-photographed locations (the Flinders Ranges and (IMDB tells me) Tasmania) means the experience degenerates to parsing visual cliches. The obviously-bad guys mumble in something vaguely Germanic, wear World War I-era gas masks like an old episode of Doctor Who and wield bolt-action rifles of a similar vintage. Obviously bad guys are white and racist and so they strand Mwajemi Hussein (credited as BlackWoman) in a cage on a trailer in a salt pan in the middle of nowhere for reasons unknown. She breaks out and walks to an industrial area, having a few unkind encounters along the way, where she is enslaved (I think), again in a Doctor Who sort of way. Breaking free she returns to her country with an injured young Indian woman (Deepthi Sharma credited as BrownGirl) only to expire in the locked cage on the trailer as if it was all a dream.

I guess you could consider it a theatrical take on the great cycle of life, the karmic wheel, the alienation of humanity from both nature and industry, the survival of a woman named Kindness, I don't know. Nothing much is made of the fact that she is Black but not Australian Indigenous. It reaches for District 9 (2009) at times but lacks the humour of that and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971). The best bit was Sharma doing tai chi in a graveyard with a mountain backdrop. The cake at the start reminded me of the The Missing Picture (2013).

Surprisingly widely reviewed. The mainstream reviewers tried to boost: Luke Buckmaster (cryptic, meditative, burrows in deep), Paul Byrnes, and less so Peter Bradshaw (dreamlike, floatingly indeterminate). Those less reflexive about pumping the local product were unenthusiastic: Norah Masige (essentialises coloured people, trauma porn), Nadine Whitney (unsubtle).

Kindle. Depressing. Extremely referential, even more so than his previous non-fiction works such as The Age of Anger (2017). These references come so thick and fast, and the hefty bibliography is more intimidating than helpful (quantity having a lack of quality all its own), that I just let it wash over me. This is annoying as he does give the odd intriguing pointer (such as to elements of Muhammad Asad's identity) that may be worth chasing up.

One argument he wants to make is the consanguinity of European colonialism and Nazism, that the lack of German overseas colonies after World War I motivated them to colonise Europe itself. The blowback from that was the construction of Israel by Europeans paid for with Arab lands; that is, yet another colonial project. I don't think he explained how Europe has benefited from this beachhead in Arabia. Things are not connected to the exigencies of the Cold War. I couldn't see the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish experience given the Australian Government's historical policies towards the Indigenous peoples of this country.

Ultimately his prognosis is bleak and he explores few recognisably novel or optimistic ideas. Deep into the epilogue, when the text is almost exhausted, Mishra says:

As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.

Goodreads. Omer Bartov read it alongside other takes. Ben Hubbard attempted a summary for the New York Times. Charlie English, similarly for the Guardian but with more context: where do Hamas and Iran fit in this account? Mishra was at the Adelaide Writers' Week back in March after visiting UNSW in February.

Wes Anderson's latest. He's been in linear decline since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and this continues that trend. The repeated verbal tics (Benicio Del Toro's "Myself, I feel very safe" and "Help yourself to a hand grenade") echoed those in Jim Jarmusch's similarly unsuccessful The Limits of Control (2009). The holes in the plot are observed (in a scene with Jeffrey Wright) then brushed off. By then, or perhaps it was when Scarlett Johansson contemplated marriage, or when I realised Mia Threapleton was going to deliver everything flat, I had stopped trying to follow anything. Visually it's OK but he's done better.

Dana Stevens: "Wes Anderson’s New Movie May Be His Worst Yet." Peter Sobczynski: is it or is it not "another odd and idiosyncratic trifle from Anderson"? And so on.

Visually lush animation. Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. I wasn't so enthralled that I didn't feel the echoes of American teenage classics Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Catcher in the Rye (1951). The synthetic mythos was probably mostly of a piece with Japanese lore (like Godzilla (1954)) but the literal doors between realms is a tired trope that doesn't hold up too well in the action sequences.

The plot has the teenage heroine somehow unplugging a god in cat form from a node that prevents earthquakes. She then traverses Japan (how much I do not know) in pursuit of the incoherent animal with a bloke who has been transformed into a chair; the chair put me in mind of Wall-E (2008). Along the way she has a few funny vignettes about Japanese life, which, like the rest of the movie, hint at dangers that we know will not matter. The conclusion is all schmaltzy love like Interstellar (2014). This mother-daughter (and/or self) love stands in stark contrast to the rest of the movie where (as far I could be bothered to remember) nobody is coupled up.

I don't think I've ever met a cat that wouldn't prefer to help destroy (at least parts of) the human realm. The theme of doors that need closing, the ancestor worship, the evocation of the firebombing of Tokyo (? — or Hiroshima or Nagasaki) suggest the auteur is pining for historically insular Japan.

Maya Phillips: leans on Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004). Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: three stars. A Japanese movie that was big in China.

Apparently before Dan Brown there was Umberto Eco. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet (1997)). Apparently this revived Sean Connery's career sufficiently for him to go on to greater heights in Highlander (also 1986)... or was it the other way around? A very young Christian Slater. Michael Lonsdale does his usual.

Rationalist Franciscan monk Connery arrives at an austere knowledge-preserving Benedictine monastery in wintry northern Italy in 1327 as bad stuff is happening. Supernatural or just a side effect of things having to change to stay the same? Or a foreshadowing of a debate about how much property Jesus had? Or perhaps merely an excuse for the Inquisition (in the form of F. Murray Abraham) to intervene? Slater is Connery's pupil, notionally recounting the events from old age. Without his entanglement with "the girl" (Valentina Vargas) I doubt it was all that memorable. So much effort was poured into something so humourless.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Connery as "the first modern man"; shades of Zardoz (1974) therefore. It could have been something. (And that was a barrel of pig's blood not wine!) Vincent Canby. Obviously Holmes and Watson.

Second time around with another vintage Mike Leigh. Since High Hopes (1988) the working class has been evicted from their townhouses and corralled into the projects. Ruth Sheen works at the supermarket with Lesley Manville. Both are fantastic though Manville sometimes gets too close to Blenda Blethyn's performance in Secrets and Lies (1996) for my comfort. She has two children with the very stable cab-driving Timothy Spall who mumbles his way to greatness; he shares a fantastic slow-burning scene with notional-Frenchwoman Kathryn Hunter (one of a montage of cab riders) and a tragicomic fundraising round with his family. Sally Hawkins is so young here. Mostly it's a bunch of character studies — Spall and Manville picking up where Sheen and Phil Davis left off in 1988 — until a crisis brings the stakes into sharp relief.

I have a feeling that Leigh pushed the winning formula a bit too far this time and perhaps he felt the same way; his next effort was Vera Drake (2004).

Roger Ebert: four stars. The final scene brings that dominant positive emotion of the twenty-first century, relief. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Lots of swearing. Four stars from Peter Bradshaw and a ranking of the caricatures.

#70 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Directed by Paul Ireland from a script by Damian Hill who also starred. Astronomy Class provided the opening track (Four Barang In A Tuk-Tuk) but lead John Brumpton (Romper Stomper (1992)) prefers talkback radio on his commute to his pawnshop in Footscray.

This is a series of vignettes about some people centred on that shop. The suburb felt tiny, that everyone knows everyone, but without a justification like the house sharing of John Birmingham's He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001) or a life event as in Erskineville Kings (1999). (The bookshop here is a clanger, a built-yesterday outpost of inner-city clean living whereas Gould's there was a decades-long grimy landmark.) Or the hermetic asociality of boarding-house Brisbane and Sacha Horler in Praise (1998). The vibe is 1990s, a time when you could idle on the street all day, live on the kindness of rollies begged from strangers, bet on the dogs at all hours. The audience were all young smokers then and probably noticed the absence of pubs in this scenario.

The script is generally weak. I did not enjoy the time spent with the two blokes evoking Jay and Silent Bob; Malcolm Kennard aims for Spiteri but he's no David Wenham while Mark Coles Smith is saddled with a numpty of a character that prevents him using the skills he showed in Last Cab to Darwin (2015). Ngoc Phan, essentialised, WTF. Naomi Rukavina, WTF. The dialogue is often cringe worthy and I could often predict it, especially as the romance between pawnshop-employee Hill and bookshop-employee Maeve Dermody warmed up with seconds to go. (She seemed a bit lost so far from Mosman.) Many of the storylines dangled — Kerry Armstrong beamed in from another movie for a bit, one closer to Lantana (2001) — while suicide and sundry heaviness descended without much thought or motivation. (I read Hill committed suicide in 2018; he radiates unhappiness throughout. See Wikipedia for a link to The Rooster (2023).) It doesn't even function as a time capsule of the place or era.

Heavily pumped by Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz at the time. Luke Buckmaster: two stars. Russell Marks at brutal and tenderising length. Mike Leigh-adjacent, poorly executed. (I'm not sure I agree but this is obviously not The Pawnbroker (1964).) Marketed multiculturalism, nostalgia for the mythic monoculture. Ruther Scouller also got the Bryan Brown vibes from Brumpton. Rod Quinn: "I never thought that hanging out in a pawnshop all day would be all that interesting, and I think that this film proves that."

A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of The Surfer (2025) to a less hinged performance by Nicolas Cage. Directed by Robert Bierman from a script by Joseph Minion who also wrote the similar After Hours (1985). In two sittings. I should have known better.

As everyone knows NYC is full of office jobs but really it's about the nightlife. For unclear reasons literary agent Cage is going nuts and imagines he has a mutually-satisfying thing going with vampire Jenifer Beals (Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) etc.). Maria Conchita Alonso (The Running Man (1987)) plays his secretary, Elizabeth Ashley (Happiness (1998)) gamely and gravelly his shrink. Throughout I felt I was laughing at more than with when I wasn't bored. The misogynistic violence is misguided, uninspired, tasteless. There is no point.

Caryn James. Peter Travers. IMDB trivia: a source book for Christian Bale's performance in American Psycho (2000).

Another ozploitation pointer from Harry Windsor. Directed by Arch Nicholson from a script by Everett De Roche (Long Weekend (1978), Road Games (1981), etc.) derived from Gabrielle Lord's novel from 1980 which drew inspiration from the actual Faraday School kidnapping of 1972. And obviously Lord of the Flies.

There's not a lot to it. Somewhere out near the Grampians and/or Gippsland (the Buchan Caves) we meet Rachel Ward in a farmer's homestead, implausibly sleeping alone. She's the teacher at the local one-room all-grades school. After the customary horsing about by the kids four masked blokes get the action started with their sawnoff shotguns, hustling the cast into a rusty old Ford van. Things go as they must from there, incorporating enough gore and wildlife shots to meet expectations for the genre. Ward struggles with fractions but knows her high science. A very young Asher Keddie appears as one of the younger kids. Robin Gray's soundtrack is generally obtrusive. Essentially TV.

John J. O'Connor at the New York Times at the time: "Throughout, Miss Ward has the good sense to look as if she would rather be back in the mini-series The Thorn Birds." All the details at Ozmovies. "Mutton Dressed as Rambo." Ward lacks the conviction and dramatic range to pull it off. The novel has her character contemplating an abortion; "Without exploring, or perhaps suspecting, all the implications of its story, Fortress presents the most disturbing, pre-emptive strike of children against the older generation that Australian fiction has to show." But various aspects of it have many precursors. And a link to Mondo Exploito in 2013.

Prompted by vague curiosity about what Rami Malek has been up to since Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Oppenheimer (2023). I think this proves that unless he's playing Freddie Mercury he's not leading man material. Also for Larry Fishburne who, despite being deep-sixed in the credits is on the IMDB poster. Directed by James Hawes (mostly TV) off a script by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down (2001) then downhill) and Gary Spinelli. Robert Littell wrote the source novel in 1981.

Much is lifted from The Odessa File (1974), though the international market destroying politics has been removed. Where Voigt got trained up to lethality by Mossad, Malek proves his incompetency with firearms to CIA dark op Fishburne and proceeds to rely on his epic IQ (170 genius points so recently in the service of the agency) to settle the score with some terrorists who have killed his wife in London for reasons. Those guys are Russians (or at least Eastern Europeans) and everyone in the target markets knows they are born bad. Where things deviate from the stock are the creative kills, perhaps echoing the Final Destination franchise that Di Rosso enjoys so much, with a geek standing in for Death. On the other hand all the office scenes are as dead as doornails, and there's far too much script kiddie and witless stuff like a burnt CD-ROM; I mean, who even has the hardware to read optical media in 2025?

The closing scenes intimate sequels, maybe even a franchise that replaces Jason Statham's notion of what the everyman can do with an office worker's or perhaps that of the last man on campus, now busy switching off lights; Matt Damon in his Good Will Hunting (1997) persona rather than Bourne, Malek as Ben Affleck's accountant without the build. (Incidentally Jon Bernthal appears for reasons unknown; he is squandered alongside those fabulous ancient cafes ala The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012).) There's a dash of Reality (2023) in trying to mine the chasm between what the agency knows and what the media says which is remarkable for its touching faith in people still caring. Perhaps this is a red state, blue state thing too.

The cast is quite good. Holt McCallany is either having a moment or has debts no honest man can pay. Fishburne does what he can, as does Michael Stuhlbarg. I did not enjoy Rachel Brosnahan's vacuity as the wife of Malek. However the movie becomes something else when Irishwoman Caitríona Balfe steps out of a vintage John le Carré adaptation with a performance of heft and ballast. With her up front it could maybe have been something. The cinematography is rubbish.

Brian Tallerico: one-and-a-half stars at Roger Ebert's venue: "go watch Spy Game instead." Alissa Wilkinson: tries for 1970s paranoid thriller, misses. A remake of a 1981 film featuring Christopher Plummer. Peter Sobcynski.