Thriller

Safe House

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Safe House
  • IMDB: link

safe-house-posterSafe House just goes to show you that Hollywood can find a way to take even one of the most boring jobs of any CIA agent would ever have and turn it into an action thriller with a horde of nameless bad guys who never seem to run out of ammunition.

The first thing you need to understand about Safe House is that very little of the film’s close to two-hour running time actually takes place in a safe house. Ryan Reynolds stars as Agent Matt Weston who has spent the last 12 months keeping an empty safe house in South Africa ready in case the CIA needs to safeguard, interrogate, or house someone in the area at a moment’s notice.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
  • IMDB: link

tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-posterSmiley. George Smiley. Reinterpreting John le Carré’s novel for the big screen director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan drop the audience into the middle of a Cold War British spy tale centered around five senior intelligence officers under suspicion of being a Soviet mole.

Gary Oldman stars as George Smiley, the right hand of the former Head of the Service (John Hurt) who was pushed out the door with his friend. Smiley is coaxed out of retirement by Oliver Lancum (Simon McBurney) after an operation in Hungary ends in disaster when an agent (Mark Strong) is shot while trying to buy intelligence from a Hungarian informant.

Smiley is charged with discovering the truth of the rumor that there is a high-ranking Soviet mole inside the “Circus” (what those who work for MI6 and the SIS call home). To do so he will have to work outside the bounds of the Circus, hiding the fact that any investigation is in progress to some of the smartest and most paranoid men in the entire country.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
  • IMDB: link

the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-poster1I’ve never read the novels by Stieg Larsson or seen the original Swedish film, so I went into David Fincher‘s version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (adapted by screenwriter Steven Zaillian) without any preconceptions or foreknowledge of how the events of the plot would unfold. I enjoyed the film as a suspense thriller but I expected more (although I’m unsure if blame should be laid at the feet of the script or the original source material).

We begin not with one tale but two. The first concerns journalist and editor of a small left wing magazine Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). The film opens with Blomkvist losing a libel case for his pubilshed accusations against billionaire financier Hans-Erik Wennerström (Ulf Friberg). Unwilling to to stay with the magazine and hurt it, and his co-editor and part-time lover (Robin Wright) any further, he finds himself untethered and at a loss as to what to do next.

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The Debt

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Debt
  • IMDB: link

the-debt-blu-raySecrets always come out. When a former Mossad agent (Ciarán Hinds) is killed on the eve of the release of a book glorifying the events that made him and two others national heroes, Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) is forced to face the past and weigh the consequences of telling the truth after so many years.

Most of The Debt takes place in Cold War flashbacks as Mossad agents Rachel Singer (Jessica Chastain), David Peretz (Sam Worthington), and Stefan Gold (Marton Csokas), are chosen to kidnap a Nazi scientist known as “The Surgeon of Birkenau” (Jesper Christensen), and smuggle him out of East Berlin for trial in Israel.

When the escape plan is compromised the three agents are forced to sit on the Nazi for days, as tensions fray, until a new plan can be devised. Eventually the doctor is shot by Rachel while trying to escape. At least that’s what history records.

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Limitless

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Limitless
  • IMDB: link

Based on the novel by Alan Glynn, Bradley Cooper stars as a struggling writer who takes an experimental drug allowing him to use a larger part of his brain and granting him enhanced intelligence and creativity. His world instantly expands as he writes his novel and begins to clean up on Wall Street by using his intellect to see patterns in numbers.

However, the drug doesn’t come without a cost. Aside from being a stolen commodity which several people are willing to kill for, NZT-48 causes blackouts and time lapses, and is highly addictive as the body becomes dependent on the drug.

Using his enhanced abilities Eddie attempts to make his fortune, use his abilities to help a corporate tycoon (Robert De Niro) with an important merger, win back his former love (Abbie Cornish), and stay ahead of those (Andrew Howard, Tomas Arana) willing to kill for the drug.

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