This week continues the tiring trend of the straight to video action movie. More recently, such feature films include Aaron Eckhart or Olga Kurylenko, and the Chief of Station directed by Jesse V. Johnson has both. It is actually Eckhart whom the film stars with Kurylenko only in a supporting role, but let’s run with this.
There were lots of programmers like these back in the eighties and nineties when Hollywood was on a roll. Medium budget ones which based on the stars of more than one A list actor but not too many as to make it a super blockbuster and directed by a seasoned professional who often had an extremely busy career filled with good films that did not stand out. These were ordinary films that got the job done and weren’t really all that great. You feel like watching them, and basically that is all that can be said about them. And this is exactly what this film is about.
Eckhart’s role is of a CIA Station Chief, Ben Malloy. Sure, he is a spy but he has a family with a loving wife, Farrah (Laetitia Eido). She is a spy too but after one of the missions she dies and he has no choice but to retire. Sadly, his son, Nick (Chris Petrovski), won’t pick up the phone anymore. Except that, this particular case is about her. Perhaps she wasn’t killed by a suicide bomber but Malloy starts to lose hope. (While I watched the film, I couldn’t understand why a character explained things in such a way that it sounded like an accident rather than an intention, especially since the film suggested the complete opposite.) In trying to defend his wife’s memory and get to the bottom of the “who was she?”, the ‘mistaken’ former drafter of government plans is forced to return to her profession.
Readers of the book Chief of Station will undoubtedly feel recycled feelings, this time in a rush but also willing to finish the task. One word about the plot–it is dull, ignorance from the authors is rolling over. The story is like that of Tom Clancy’s but instead there’s a jumble of alliances, treachery a the shambles that barely holds. At the plot’s epicenter, the audience is still none the wiser. George Mahaffey and his characters drive it encumbered with twists and turns without adding rhythm and rhyme to the storytelling. It what Malloy says is a “thing” that everybody is attempting to get for some unknown reason, and in the end you wonder why it would even matter where it is. Or indeed, whether it actually ever existed. And as all authors of spy stories pretend, they occur at different times as well.
This is nice. Johnson, working with European locations and a brilliant abusive industrial look, is at his best. Overall, this appears to be to a rather greater budget than that which Johnson is accustomed to, and he goes all out for it.
Well, when action does come, it has been as great as ever, the stuntman turned director has never disappointed in this area. Perhaps not to the extent seen in some of his more popular films, especially those targeting Scott Adkins. Rather than framing that as the crux of the film, it is more of a tense thriller where the pressure and suspense continue to mount and mount. The only trouble is that none of the intrigue feel as taut or as intense as they should be.
The final act brings out the big guns, both literally and figuratively, and does not disappoint–there are shootouts, a fantastic car chase, a cool hand-to-hand fight scene, and other thoroughly awesome things. This is when Kirilenko finally arrives–she is first shown in a JPEG on the computer, but shows her face when the timeclock reads 59 minutes. She has one nice scene which takes, well, a scene, but mostly is a bit of an exposition device and rather underused.
Ekhart once again shows that he is capable of leading mid-tier movies of this nature. Look at The Bricklayer from this year for another example. Ekhart possesses enough charm and presence and he carries things, though he definitely doesn’t scorch the frame. It’s clear why at one time studios had plans to push him as a superstar no one ever did. Still, he’s carved out a nice little space for himself with genre projects of this type and size and I’m all for that trajectory.
A few of Johnson’s fellow accomplices also appear at the occasion. Most notably, Daniel Bernhardt. Alas, he is not given much to do. He is given one opportunity to show off his talents as one of the best action actors working today, yet beyond that, he is a generic thug. While he does have Russian prison tattoos which make him look cool. James Faulkner appears in a few scenes as “an elder intelligence officer” with no other description apart from that. After having stolen Johnson’s Hell Hath No Fury, Nina Bergman appears for one minute in a single scene. It is described as if it will turn into something compelling but lo and behold, nothing else develops with that aside and it becomes useless. Alex Pettyfer does a passable role as another spy practitioner, who you know is the villain from frame one. You see someone and say as if to confirm “That’s a bad guy over there,” while pointing directly at him.
Other than that, there are a couple of other minor uplot holes, like Wallop Malloy being unable to remember a character’s name after he has been introduced to it a few scenes behind, or gunshots as well as an explosion on a relatively small boat as being unnoticeable cues that alert the bad guys that there are shenanigans afoot.
The film telegraphs its espionage tale from the very beginning, and does not veer off course to change it up, yet it’s so clichéd. Once again, for those that manage to sit through the whole film, there is a nice payoff in the end. Chief of Station is the type of film that I expect to see among the trending films on Netflix in a month or two. It will be in the top 10 for a week or two and movie websites focused on clickbait will claim that an old action movie has come back and is dominating the trends. Lots of people will tune into it, though they would be hard pressed to recall much of the plot. [Grade: C+]
SPOILER: I wish to say nothing much in this regard, however, there is a great scene in the end where Molloy’s son nick gratuitously fires a grenade launcher from the hip at an immobilized helpless bad guy. (To be fair, the villain did shoot the kids mom.) But most importantly, DADDY IS BEAMING WITH PRIDE! This is cruelly funny.
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