Avoid

This made for TV movie taken from a Robert Ludlum story unsuccessfully tries to replicate the thrills from the Bourne movies. The bad guys are everywhere – Afghanistan to the Middle East, in the government and among pharmaceutical companies. And not everyone else is squeaky clean or filthy dirty.

Characters do stupid things. Sophia Myles plays Stephen Dorff’s wife [girl, financee]: Let’s go to dinner. She steps from the hotel. I need a sweater. Another ten minutes of film later, she and Stephen have checked out of the hotel, yet she leaves her cell phone in the room. I would hope her work as a medical researcher of infectious diseases was handled with more care, but she seems soporific. She is clearly seems someone to be murdered, and later she killed.

Stepping into Sophia’s place is Mira Sorvino, once a bedmate of Dorff’s. For the first 90 minutes of film, the former lover waiting in the wings, is her role. She supposedly is outside all agencies, so she has no connections. She’s completely free lance, yet she is well-informed. She suddenly appears in Afghanistan, having previously been in Paris. It’s convenient to have extra friends show up to help kill bad guys.

Stephen Dorff’s, former secret agent, has a bad time in this movie. In every fight he is outweighed by 30-50 pounds, and every opponent is at least six feet tall. Right off, when Stephen Dorff returns to the hotel room to retrieve Sophia’s phone, he get into a fight with a bad guy. He turns his opponent around – face to the wall – and the audience can see what’s coming next: An elbow from the opponent sent Stephen sprawling. Next is a foot chase which Stephen loses.

At that point I realized there would be many scenes ahead in this overlong movie where fast forward on the DVD could be used – one-quarter, perhaps a third of the movie. Every time Stephen confronts a bad guy the audience knows he’s going to get pounded. This is not “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Yet, like the Champ, Stephen emerges with no bruises on body or face. Indeed, no ill-effects linger from the last fight: Stephen, wounded, fights bad guy, wounded, on a bridge. They fall off, into the sewage treatment plant known as the Potomac River.

By The End Stephen Dorff doesn’t seem much mutated, but I noted that Mira Sorvino had the grace to avoid the final scenes.