THE SPY WHO LOST THE PLOT
Who can you trust? Who cares in this messy, convoluted thriller
Unlocked (15) Verdict: Daft, labyrinthine chase Sleepless (15) Verdict: Might not keep you awake
The veteran British director Michael Apted has made some decent thrillers over the years (Gorky Park, enigma, The World Is Not enough) but Unlocked is not even close to being one of them, which is a shame, because it looks great on paper.
The cast, led by Noomi Rapace, includes Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, Orlando Bloom and Toni Collette. Locations include London, Paris, Moscow and Prague, not to mention Langley, Virginia, which we have all come to know as home to CIA headquarters from that ubiquitous screen caption, which so often pops up in inferior thrillers in the hope of conferring some excitement on proceedings — as if the merest mention of the CIA will make us all sit forward and clutch the arm of the person next to us.
Rapace plays Alice, once a crack agent but now in selfimposed purdah after what she considered to be her own slipshod work in preventing a terrorist outrage in Paris.
With thunderous improbability — something of a recurring theme in this film — she now works as a social housing officer in a working-class area of London, using the job to feed intelligence to her contact in the British secret service ( Collette, rather curiously appearing to model her character half on Judi Dench’s M and half on a post-eurythmics Annie Lennox).
Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before Alice comes out from behind her desk and starts shooting people. This happens when her old CIA paymasters bring her in from the cold to help foil another terrorist outrage by interrogating a suspected jihadist.
her task seems straightforward enough, except that screenwriter Peter O’Brien has cooked up a game of doublecross, triple- cross and even quadruple-cross. Nobody can
trust anyone. Soon, Alice has some worrying news for the big boss back at Langley (Malkovich, giving what these days is his standard eccentric performance as a mildly deranged grouch).
‘You’ve been penetrated,’ she says, and it’s true. MI5 and MI6 have been penetrated, too. By now, the only thing that remains impenetrable is the plot.
WITH almost half the film over, the single person Alice has been able to trust so far is her avuncular ex-chief, Eric (Douglas), and he’s been shot to death. Or so it seems. I’ll leave you to decide whether Douglas would ever accept a script in which he croaks before the end of act one.
At any rate, he certainly doesn’t snuff it before giving Alice the address of a nearby safe house. Unfortunately, with gloomy inevitability, the safe house has also been penetrated. Indeed, it is such an unsafe safe house that when she gets there, there’s a masked burglar walking out with the telly.
Alice duly rips off his balaclava to reveal … Orlando Bloom, looking dishy in a grungy housebreaker sort of way. I half wondered whether they might jump into bed together, but it’s not that kind of film.
Instead, it’s the kind of film that eventually yields a fiendish plot to launch a biological attack on tens of thousands of people pouring into Wembley Stadium, not for the FA Cup final or anything as prosaically British, but for an NFL American Football match.
As if a nerve gas attack weren’t bad enough, this is a nerve gas attack on cheerleaders with pompoms. If you really want to get all those U.S. movie audiences to buy into the gravity of a situation in London, then I suppose threatening a top game of gridiron might do the trick.
Regrettably, Apted is unable to pull off the bigger trick of making his narrative anything but supremely implausible and, consequently, more than a little silly. Unlocked rattles along pacily enough, but at the advanced age of 76 the director ought to know by now that when you can’t trust anyone in a film, you stop trusting the film itself.
SLEEPLESS is another thriller, mercifully set in only one place: Las Vegas. It is a humdrum remake of the excellent 2011 French film Nuit Blanche, and stars Jamie Foxx as Vincent, an apparently corrupt detective who steals 25 kilos of cocaine in a deadly shoot-out.
he then finagles his way into investigating the crime himself, with his similarly bent partner, enabling them to fix the evidence. On their tail is an irreproachably honest detective, Jennifer (Michelle Monaghan), who hates the fact that ‘this city is crawling with dirty cops’.
Even more worryingly for Vincent, the drugs haul he nicked was intended for the local gangster, Novak ( Scoot McNairy), a man so brutal he has his own cousin’s tongue chopped out for an indiscretion too far.
So Novak is a dangerous enemy, and proves it by abducting Vincent’ s 16-year-old son. the boy will get released if Vincent hands over the drugs, but he can’t, because Jennifer has found where he stashed them, and hidden them herself until such time as she can nail him.
that’s the essence of the story, give or take a few convoluted yet dispiritingly predictable twists. It all unfolds semi- watchably, albeit with an absurdly overwrought percussive score and a checklist of thriller cliches t that Swiss director Baran bo O Odar ticks off one by one.
these include the obligatory hotel kitchen fight scene, a set-piece that has become so commonc in thrillers and action movies that it always comes as a faint surprise to me to watch the final stages of Masterchef and not see a couple of heavies pummelling each other half to death with saucepans in the background, while in the foreground the beetroot gnocchi are lovingly anointed with a walnut and sage butter.