Jon Hamm plays it safe in formulaic thriller
When Mad Men began its eight-year run in 2007, the core appeal of Jon Hamm’s advertising guru Don Draper seemed to be his unflappability – that in crises both professional and domestic, no Brylcreemed hair fell out of place. But as the show wore on, it dawned that Don was most fascinating when his brow began to drip, and the pictureperfect veneer threatened to crack. Those who like their Hamm stewing in its own juice will find much to enjoy in The Negotiator, a period political thriller set in Eighties Beirut, in which the actor plays a former diplomat drafted by the United States government to thrash out a highstakes hostage dispute.
His name is Mason Skiles, and when we first meet him it is 1972, at a diplomatic reception in full multicultural swing. He is a skilled talker, monologuing appealingly to guests about the thronging Lebanese city being like “a boarding house without a landlord”. But he is also trusting to a fault, and a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan called Karim, whom Mason has doing odd jobs in his grace-and-favour residence, has a family connection that rains down disaster on his roof. Fast-forward 10 years and the trusting streak is gone, replaced by sandpaper-jawed world-weariness and a serious whisky habit. Mason is back in the US, working as an intermediary in labour disputes. But then a CIA agent in Beirut is abducted by a Palestinian terror group, and apparently only Mason has the personal connections and expertise to broker his release.
For a film of this type, The Negotiator has a safe-hands pedigree that’s like a whole sky full of Kitemarks. In addition to a leading man in a role that suits him to a tee, there is a twisty but logical screenplay by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) and handsome, streamlined direction from Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Transsiberian). Rosamund Pike also brings her usual steely charisma to the part of Mason’s state-appointed handler.
With those chess pieces in place, The Negotiator is content to groove away on its suspenseful, Bridge of Spies-esque plot without making any broader political points, or, more limitingly, coming up with any images with the kind of staying power its central performance deserves. The film looks good in the sense that it looks like good television, and its recreation of period and place (the film was shot in Morocco) feels plausible rather than striking. Hamm may be 47 years-old, with more than two decades in this business, but he isn’t a movie star, at least not yet. The Negotiator is not the film to do it, but it’ll absolutely do for now.