By Preston Wilder
Reviews have been harsh for The Expatriate. The film is called Erased in the US (where the concept of an expat is less familiar, maybe because if you live in the States you’re assumed ipso facto to be American), and critics seem keen to erase it from their memories as quickly as possible. Personally, I enjoyed it. It’s not really Jason Bourne-ish, even though our hero Ben (Aaron Eckhart) is a former CIA agent; the Bourne films are propulsive and big on kinetic action, whereas this is more of a mystery adventure with Hitchcockian overtones. There’s a bit of 70s thriller Three Days of the Condor in the concept of a man in a seemingly innocuous office job whose colleagues are slain for reasons unknown – and of course there’s a bit of The Lady Vanishes, only here it’s ‘The Office Vanishes’.
One day Ben is working as a systems tester in Belgium, where he lives with sulky teenage daughter Amy (Liana Liberato), the next his entire place of work has disappeared. The office is just empty rooms. The bank has no record of the salaries he’s been receiving. The company he worked for claims to have no idea what he’s talking about, and the emails through which he was hired have been deleted from his Blackberry (you’d think he’d have some sort of written contract, but whatever). As in Unknown, the Liam Neeson Euro-thriller from a couple of years ago – which I also seemed to like more than most people – this paranoid premise is so instantly intriguing it buys a lot of goodwill, which comes in handy later as the film deflates into merely watchable.
To be honest, The Expatriate doesn’t play its hand especially well. It should’ve milked the ambiguity as long as possible (our minds should be toying with sci-fi possibilities like dream and parallel dimension), whereas it only takes a few minutes for a thug with a gun to arrive, threatening Ben and Amy – then the thug gets killed and a key is found on his corpse, and the key opens a locker and a folder is found in the locker, and we’re firmly in airport-novel territory. Also on hand is Olga Kurylenko as Ben’s CIA handler Anna (her role is elusive, though she does seem to cry very easily for a secret agent) and assorted shifty corporate types including an evil CEO with the skeletal menace of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, corporate negligence turning out to be the real villain.
There’s a subtext there, if you want to tease it out. Ben and Amy go up against Big Business and are helped by the have-nots, Amy’s Algerian boyfriend and his family. Amy herself is preparing a photo exhibition called ‘Without Voices’, focusing on immigrants, refugees and other people who have nowhere to go because “we screwed up their country”. Ben initially warns his daughter not to get caught up in other people’s problems – but his own reason for leaving the Agency was because he “grew a conscience” and refused to follow orders. “Don’t let your noble moral compass get in the way, Ben,” warns the chief baddie. Earlier, Ben reminds Anna of their youthful ideals, when they started out working for the CIA in Somalia: “We stood for something. We believed we could change the world…”
None of this is especially original, but respect to The Expatriate for dwelling on it, just as it dwells on the details of its McGuffin (the guilty secret at the heart of the cover-up) and the details of the father-daughter relationship (“When Mom was sick, you’re all she talked about,” sighs Amy tearfully) – though it can’t quite transcend the clichés in that relationship, nor the ultimate, rather dodgy moral that sulky teenage girls should listen to their daddies. This is a half-baked movie, but at least it tries to bake – if you’ll pardon a strained analogy – in a world where most films are content to be fast food.
‘More plot holes than a Swiss cheese!’ scoffed a friend as we filed out of the cinema – yet couldn’t think of any when I challenged him to come up with specific examples. The Expatriate is actually quite solid, for the genre, it’s just (I suspect) that it lacks any true originality, so none of it feels convincing. There are swooping, Hollywood-style establishing shots of Belgian cities. There’s a shadowy “expert” – a professional assassin – who never speaks. There are action scenes in a parking lot, a hotel, a morgue and a hospital, the last-named leading to some unintentional black comedy as a patient on an IV gets whacked by a stray bullet. This is diverting Euro-hokum that requires no justification, and doesn’t get one. Personally, I enjoyed it.
DIRECTED BY Philipp Stolzl
STARRING Aaron Eckhart, Liana Liberato, Olga Kurylenko
Belgium/Canada/UK 2012 100 mins
