Agent Game

Agent Game

It’s a risky move to put the word “agent” in the title of a movie like this, because then some reviewer might suggest that the actors fire their representation. You see what I did there? Boy oh boy.

“Agent Game,” written and directed by Grant S. Johnson, starts with a shot of an old man sitting on a bench on an empty street. Oh look, it’s Mel Gibson! He sees something, gets up from the bench, pulls a gun out from under his coat and starts shooting while a mournful cello plays. Then Gibson barks into his mobile phone “We have a problem.” Yes we do: There’s a crazy old guy on an empty street shooting at nothing.

At the end of the movie we do find out what Gibson’s character is so worked up about he’s some kind of shady intelligence bigwig but for Johnson to hide it as long as he does doesn’t seem like an attempt to unfurl a convoluted plot so much as it does to budgetary constraints.

The movie cuts away to Antwerp, Belgium, where we know all the spy action is going down, and gives us a time marker. For the rest of the picture we are unmoored as far as titles indicating wheres and whens are concerned. Instead, “Agent Game” juggles three different timelines of one story which would be an interesting and engaging approach if there were any actual interest in the story in the first place.

“Agent Game” declines to specify which part of our bloated U.S. intelligence alphabet soup it is dealing with that seems to be part of its tedious “point” but here is what happens in order: At a black site agents played by Jason Isaacs, Dermot Mulroney and Annie Ilonzeh have got Barkhad Abdi strung up by his arms while they grill him about terrorism or maybe they are just playing possum? It doesn’t end well for him, and Johnson has the character played by Ilonzeh, a person of color, commit the most gratuitous violence against him. The agent played by Mulroney goes on the run.

Then later or is it earlier in the movie? it’s unclear Adam Canto, Katie Cassidy and Rhys Coiro, as a trio of mismatched agents who won’t keep Johnnie To up at night with their heroics, “extract” a guy and bring him hooded to a private plane. Once on the plane they start getting unauthorized messages on their phones. Yikes!

This cuts with scenes of Gibson in Washington D.C. conducting job interviews. Turns out he put the team of Canto, Cassidy and Coiro together and placed Ilonzeh’s character in charge of them.

In case you are wondering, at some point the hood comes off the guy on the plane and if you’re surprised by who is under it I guess I feel kind of bad for you.

“Agent Game” looks like it was shot in the dark often, or close enough, this is a murky nonsense that hopes to skate by on what it takes for trenchant cynicism about geopolitical chess.

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