Directed by: Jonathan Ogilvie
Starring: Hugo Weaving, Tilda Cobham-Harvey, Chris Benton
The screenplay for this movie is based on the novel “The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad.
Go and watch the movie and if you see any secret agents there, please let me know.
After a very careful watch you’ll find no agents, and no secrets either.
You will just find one somewhat lucid movie, but presented in such a weird way you will get multiple migraines if you are able to watch this one to the end. If you give up watching somewhere in the middle, don’t worry, you are not alone. Also, you didn’t miss anything: the second part of the movie is just as visually horrible as the first part. That means that the whole product is one visual disaster, which gives you no pleasure, just an unnecessary headache and an urge to vomit.
Director Jonathan Ogilvie dropped the ball big time. He was thinking: “I’ll do something unique. It’s gonna be spectacular. Instead of normal camera angles, I’ll use artificial, surveillance camera angles and it’ll be superb.” Wrong Jonathan! Very Wrong! You just successfully made everyone who tried to watch this movie hate you and give their word to themselves that they will never, ever watch any other of your future movies (if he gets another movie after this).
The plot of the movie is unclear. It’s supposed to be something about the activities of a police informant who gets in trouble. To get out of the mess, he wants to stage a fake terrorist attack using his girlfriend’s innocent autistic brother. The autistic boy gets killed but the informant will also pay the price: his girlfriend will put a large screwdriver through his throat as revenge for her brother’s death. Police bureaucracy is involved in all this and so is high-level politics.
If you change the camera angles, if you infuse some dynamics in the movie and if you drop all the weirdo characters- you will have the foundation to build something decent. Probably not a masterpiece, but something watchable. The “avant-garde” approach of Ogilvie, though, doesn’t give this movie any chance. It’s buried alive without a chance for survival.
Hugo Weaving is among the cast of the movie. It’s not easy to picture him anywhere else than in the “Matrix” trilogy. And really, after almost two decades if you did not watch him anywhere else, you will see no difference. The same voice intonation, the same face, same gestures. Looks like that’s only the thing he has- here, now, and years ago- just in much different circumstances and in something which was, luckily, far, far better than today’s downfall called “Lone Wolf.”
