Review: The Double

When a US senator is assassinated, the FBI believe a supposedly dead Soviet spy named Cassius to be the culprit. Richard Gere plays a retired CIA agent brought out of the cold by former colleague Martin Sheen to be paired with nerdy FBI agent Topher Grace in order to hunt the culprit down. But Gere says it can’t be Cassius, because he was on the case some twenty odd years ago. Odette Yustman (now Annable) plays Grace’s pretty young wife, Chris Marquette plays a co-worker of Grace’s, whilst Tamer Hassan and Stephen Moyer play no-good Russkies, the latter imprisoned.

 

This 2011 directorial debut by screenwriter Michael Brandt ironically has one of the worst screenplays I’ve come across in ages, by Brandt and Derek Haas (who both worked on the scripts for “Wanted” and the superior remake of “3:10 to Yuma”). It doesn’t even begin to work. For much of the film’s length, you feel like this is a crappy direct-do-DVD Steven Seagal spy-actioner, except with Richard Gere in the Seagal role. You’d swear this really was one of Seagal’s unused scripts (a sequel to “Shadow Man” or “The Foreigner”, perhaps?), only Brandt isn’t as much of a show-off director as the dorks Seagal tends to work with. Even Topher Grace’s character starts out like the typical latter-day Seagal sidekick (Matthew Davis in “Into the Sun”, for instance), and Stephen Moyer plays the kind of role I could see C-grade bad guy Andrew Divoff in. Tamer Hassan, meanwhile, turns up in a whole lot of C-grade action movies, so you could definitely see Seagal sliding on in here.

 

It’s certainly not very original, and it’s definitely not a good fit for Gere at all, as he becomes even more miscast the longer the film goes on. What in the hell are he, Martin Sheen, and Topher Grace doing in this? Well, in the case of Sheen the answer is ‘not much’.

 

The film’s big twist (which in the version I saw was revealed at around the 40 minute mark, but for others it seems to have been less than that, which is odd) is so incredibly transparent that I felt as though the film’s second big twist was merely tacked-on so that they can rationalise the transparency of the earlier twist. ‘See, that wasn’t really the twist!’. Nice try, but big twist or not, you spend the next thirty or so minutes twiddling your thumbs and waiting for one of the main character’s to catch on to what we already know. That just can’t be excused. Like “The Resident”, revealing such a twist (apparently it’s even revealed in the trailer- I’m still not buying it, though) really adds nothing, except a touch of self-loathing with one of the characters in this case. Big deal, that’s just not enough, and it kinda short changes at least two of the main performances as a result. Without wanting to spoil too much myself, let’s just say that the good in revealing the twist is far outweighed by the bad, and just seems like a botch-job.

 

And then when the second big twist comes...it actually doesn’t make any sense, despite being pretty predictable too (Especially if you look at the damn title). At first I thought the second twist was pretty cool, but play the film back over in your mind and then tell me there aren’t enormous gaping holes in logic. It simply doesn’t hold up, they’ve just tacked it on, really. Not only that, but there’s a lot of unanswered questions in the end, as well as a bad taste in one’s mouth. What is the point of it all? I couldn’t see one, and that’s a big problem. There’s certainly no heroes, and I’m not even sure they chose the best character to end the film with. One could say that they’re deliberately giving us an unhappy ending but I believe that about as much as I believe that the identity of Cassius was so unimportant to the story that it doesn’t matter we find out the answer before the hour mark. Yeah, nice try. Brandt and Haas probably think they’re a lot cleverer than they actually are, and they’ve definitely watched “No Way Out” a few too many times. Meanwhile, would an FBI man and a CIA guy be talking about spy stuff in front of the FBI guy’s wife? Nope. That’s just stupid screenwriting.

 

Odette Annable (formerly Yustman) looks beautiful, and I keep waiting for the talented Chris Marquette (the best thing in the film) to find the right role, but otherwise, this is an awful film trying to pass for something better simply by a few decent names. I ain’t buying it. Often an actor won’t know if a film is going to be shit or not just by reading the script. I refuse to believe that the actors involved here could’ve thought this crap was going to work. How did it ever see the light of day? This is a seriously stupid film lacking any energy or suspense whatsoever, even if it does have a second ace up its sleeve.

 

Rating: C-