NOW SHOWING

MOVIE: Beirut

STARRING: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike

RATING: MA REVIEWER: Wenlei Ma

JON Hamm knows his way around a damaged man.

After playing Don Draper for seven years on Mad Men, taking on the role of an alcoholic negotiator is child’s play for the American actor.

There’s the physicality of it – the ever present sweaty sheen on his face, the slight haziness in the eyes, or waking up in the driving lane of a carpark, car still running, hand rested next to a half-eaten doughnut and sporting a serious nine o’clock shadow.

But it’s really in the way Hamm stuffs that tortured soul into the shell of a man with something to prove and the talents to do it that makes him so compelling to watch.

In Beirut, a political-spy thriller directed by Brad Anderson and written by Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy, Hamm plays Mason Skiles, a former diplomat turned corporate negotiator.

When we first meet Mason, it’s 1972 and he’s throwing a glamorous party in his mansion in Beirut, schmoozing and circulating among his guests, the paragon of ease and confidence. Then a betrayal, followed by unthinkable tragedy.

Flash forward 10 years and Mason is washed-up, running his own shop as a corporate negotiator between getting wasted. At a bar (because where else would he be), a man approaches him with an offer. Well, not an offer so much as a demand.

In disguise as a guest lecturer to the American University in Beirut, a place he swore he would never return to, he’s recruited by the CIA to recover a US hostage taken by a fringe group associated with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Mason was requested specifically because of a personal connection.

The Beirut he’s returned to is not the one he left in 1972.

Beirut is in cinemas now.