Mark Reviews Movies: AGENT GAME

Agent Game, Saban Films

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | April 7, 2022

The title is appropriate, at least. Agent Game revolves around a kind of game, involving a group of CIA agents and operatives, in which just about everyone has a secret or otherwise hidden agenda.

Tyler W. Konney and Mike Langer's screenplay is basically a game, too. As it jumps back and forth between various periods of time within its story, details from the past inform things happening in the present. At a certain point, we realize the dissemination of exposition isn't just the reason for the way this story is structured. Giving us the back story is essentially the only point of this movie. In a way, then, it's not actually telling us a story. It's simply offering the premise for one.

The narrative's two major timelines both feature a mission that's bound to go wrong. In the present day, a team is preparing to detain a target. The major players here—since most of the team is killed by the man they're trying to capture—are Kavinsky (Adan Canto), Miller (Katie Casidy), and Reese (Rhys Coiro). The man they're after is Harris (Dermot Mulroney), who was involved in a different mission that failed and left a couple people dead.

Several weeks earlier and intercut at intervals when there's some downtime in the present-day story (It's mostly downtime, but more on that later), we see that mission. It's an interrogation, being led by Bill (Jason Isaacs) and with Harris, along with Visser (Annie Ilonzeh), as support. The incarcerated man is Omar (Barkhad Abdi), who runs a charitable organization that the CIA suspects to be a cover for the leaders of a terrorist group.

Anyway, Harris starts to question the detention of this man, who appears to be innocent, at a black site somewhere in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, in the present period, Kavinsky begins to wonder if there's something sinister going on behind the scenes in his team's detention of Harris.

Both teams have plenty of time to question and wonder. That's not only because the whole movie is set in a variety of confined and drab places—the dingy rooms of the interrogation location, the tiny fuselage of a private plane, and, just to not mix things up a bit, an abandoned warehouse for the story's dim but noisy climax. It's also because the plot amounts to both groups sitting or standing around, waiting for someone or something outside of their isolated bubble to set them on the path toward the truth of what's happening here.

That truth has something to do with Olsen (Mel Gibson), the big boss behind both operations. His presence introduces the entire movie, with Olsen sitting on a bench by a seemingly empty street, waiting for something, getting a text message, standing around waiting for some sign of something, and then shooting at an unseen thing or person or group of people or, for the complete absence of information or context, re-animated dinosaur, as far as we can tell. It's a flash-forward, of course, to what turns out to be the very end of the movie. That means the whole affair is a structured like a circle, which is appropriate, considering how much spinning in place this plot does.

We don't learn too much in between the opening and closing points of that circle, though. To be sure, we understand who betrayed whom, who set up and is preparing to betray the present-day team, and who put in motion the whole chain events that led to all this eventual betrayal, with all of that waiting and preparing for it in the meantime. It's simply that it doesn't matter in any way outside or beyond this insulated cycle of characters waiting for exposition, getting some, and waiting more for the rest. Finally, the screenwriters and director Grant S. Johnson overcompensate for the lack of action with a big shootout, but since they don't bother to offer any characterizations (beyond the stuff in the trio's files) or sense of momentum to the plot, there's no reason to care about it (or how messily it's staged and edited).

To be slightly fair to Agent Game, it does intrinsically have a steadily cynical perspective on matters such as rendition, harsh interrogation, and the lengths to which the people who oversee these practices will go to maintain that immoral status quo. This, of course, feels like the bare minimum of reactions to such things, so in that regard, the movie is consistent in its dedication to the bare minimum.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products