Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity and brief violence
By Derrick Bang
Nobody does an edgy, paranoid
espionage thriller better than the British.
No doubt it comes from living
under the unblinking eyes of all those surveillance cameras. (Big Brother,
indeed!)
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| With their supposedly slam-dunk case having gone increasingly pear-shaped, Martin (Eric Bana) and Claudia (Rebecca Hall) wonder about their next step. Trouble is, they shouldn't even be a "they"; because of the nature of this terrorism trial, Martin and Claudia aren't supposed to communicate ... even when each begins to worry about pernicious surveillance. |
Way back in the day, Closed Circuit would have been a tidy
little B-entry, designated as the bottom-of-the-bill companion to some prestige
A production. The irony is that many of those so-called B-films were far more
entertaining than their big-budget cousins.
The same can be said for Closed Circuit, which outshines several
of this summer’s disappointing blockbusters: better acting and directing, and a
vastly superior script.
And yet, sadly, it probably won’t
make a dime. Getting released immediately prior to the Labor Day weekend is
akin to television’s Saturday evening kiss-of-death timeslot: Nobody will
notice.
That’s a shame, because scripter
Steven Knight definitely knows his way around this genre, having previously
dazzled us with his twisty plots for 2002’s Dirty
Pretty Things and 2007’s Eastern
Promises. This guy can write; he has a gift for putting ordinary people
into extraordinary situations, while avoiding the burst of brilliant
resourcefulness that turn American action stars into invulnerable, lone wolf
superheroes.
When the two protagonists in this
narrative eye each other bleakly, during a calm between storms, and acknowledge
that there’s no way to put this particular Humpty Dumpty together again — no
successful exit to the catastrophe — we know they’re right. The situation is
beyond salvation, beyond their control.
And, maddeningly, it always has
been.
Closed Circuit — marvelous triple-entendre
title, by the way — opens its ripped-from-the-headlines story with a terrorist
attack at a busy London market. With 120 civilians dead and the British public
screaming for justice, an anonymous tip leads police to one surviving member of
the suspected terrorist cell: Farroukh Erdogan (Denis Moschitto).
Preparations begin for what
promises to be the trial of the century.
