smh– The golden age of political thrillers was the 1970s, when directors still knew how to follow Hitchcock’s rules: never bore, never preach, never take your foot off the audience’s throat. They were fuelled by the collapse of American authority, through the blacklist, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam war and the Nixon era. Alan Pakula was the most influential (Klute, The Parallax View, All The President’s Men) but there were European counterparts, such as Costa-Gavras, who tore apart the right wing dictatorship of Greece in his 1969 thriller Z.
The key element was always suspense before politics, and for that, you need to manage a credible sense of threat. That sounds obvious but it’s harder than it looks. Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, a 34-year-old Italian director, does neither in his second feature. The script, co-written with a new American screenwriter (Kevin A. Rice), rests on a ludicrous idea. It gets worse from there.
Washington is Beckett, a young American man on vacation with his girlfriend April (the usually brilliant Alicia Vikander). They have taken off from Athens early, after someone told them that there was going to be a big noisy demo in Syntagma Square. They stop off in Delphi, where she wishes there was a modern Oracle they could consult. Clues and portents drop like anvils. They are cloyingly lovey-dovey, to the point I wondered why the director was laying it on with a trowel. Bing bang boom, the car goes off the road in the night on a mountain road, and Beckett enters a world of pain.
He really does take the punishment here, in a way that reminded me of an older black star. The penny drops: John David is Denzel’s eldest son. From my count, Washington junior suffers a broken arm, broken fingers and is stabbed twice in the course of outrunning the bad guys, led by Panos Koronis, as the Greek policeman you never want to meet. Beckett falls off a cliff, runs into several cars, has multiple fistfights and is shot twice – and still he keeps running. Washington was a pro-footballer before he turned to acting, but I doubt he ever took this much punishment.
The basic form is Hitchcockian – a “wrong man” story – but with little regard for the mechanisms of suspense. This is more like “and then … and then …“, an accumulation of detail rather than a buildup of adversity that the hero cannot understand. When things do come into focus, we’re faced with a coincidence so preposterous, going back to why they left Athens, that all trust is lost. The writers hope we never ask the question – because once we do, it’s curtains for credibility.
You may say that credibility in the modern era is over-rated. That’s true. Its stock has become devalued in the era of video game plots and action-for-action’s-sake, where you can drive a truck through the loops and leaps in plots. If that were the area in which this film competes, I would judge it less of a failure, but if you want to buy a one-way ticket to Pakula-ville, you have to pay the piper. Or to unstrangle the metaphor, if belief is your currency, you had better give us something to believe in.
Washington does his best to supply it. The fault is not his. He rolls with every punch, so that by the end, we’re in the hurt locker with him. The script wants us to feel his sense of guilt too, but that’s harder. No character here has more than two levels and most just have one. Bad guys are bad from the moment we see them; good people are good, no matter what. The politics are just as obviously on the sleeve. That’s just tiresome: if you want the audience to swallow a lecture, you really have to work harder than this.
