Intrigue has never been less intriguing.
Directed by: James McTeigue
Written by: Philip Shelby
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster
The H-Bomb: Kate Abbott (Milla Jovovich) is an agent with the State Department stationed at the U.S. Embassy in London, where she is tasked with weeding out Visa applicants who could be potential terrorists. After routinely flagging the name of a Romanian scientist, Kate is on her way to join her colleagues for a surprise birthday party, when a bomb goes kaboom in the restaurant, killing several of her co-workers.
To make a long story short, Kate is forced to go on the lamb, as her superiors suspect that she may have been involved in the bombing. As Kate seeks to prove her innocence while on the run, she uncovers a terror plot that could potentially be larger in scale than the 9/11 attacks. If that isn’t enough, she also has one of the deadliest assassins in the world, a man known only as the Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan) on her trail. Let the boredom begin…
In my review for The Raven a few years back, I discussed how James McTeigue began his career on a very high note with V for Vendetta, a film I absolutely love, and has pretty much left me underwhelmed with all of his subsequent efforts. That said, I never would have thought that he could ever make a film as bad as Survivor. Even after seeing it, I still can’t come to terms with the notion that a filmmaker who made something as brilliant and powerful as Vendetta could make a movie this flat, this dreary, and this utterly fucking lifeless, but alas, here we have it.
I have a keen interest in stories about espionage and terrorism, I can even enjoy a slow burner like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I was genuinely intrigued to see what a director like McTeigue would do with this subject matter in a realistic, non-comic book setting. Turns out, he made a thriller so bloody generic it makes Sean Penn’s The Gunman look like The Matrix by comparison. At least The Gunman had some fairly exciting action scenes, this one couldn’t even muster that. Sure, the brutal war zone prologue set in Afghanistan is arresting, however, once it’s finally revealed how it ties into the main plot, it seems superfluous and hardly worth the effort.
As for the rest of the film, while McTeigue does fill it with a fair amount of running and gunning; mainly repetitive sequences of Milla Jovovich running away as Pierce Brosnan stalks after her like The Shape from Halloween, there is zero punch to any of it, and absolutely no tension whatsoever. In fact, considering Jovovich is so desperate to beat the clock in order to stop a catastrophic terror attack, there is a shocking lack of urgency to anything that’s going on. It’s just tedious exposition, leading into half-assed chase scenes, leading into more tedious exposition, so on and so forth. We’ve seen it all before, nothing new, nothing memorable. I kid you not, literally nothing is memorable here, as I’ve watched this piece of shit twice on Netflix now, and still, sizable chunks of it have vanished from my mind.
The main issue with Survivor, aside from its less-than-involving screenplay and McTeigue’s indifferent, lethargic direction, is the casting of Jovovich in the lead role. As evidenced by Ultraviolet, and The Fourth Kind, and all of those fuck-sucky Resident Evil flicks in between, Jovovich cannot carry a film to save her life. She’s the one we’re supposed to be invested in and terrified for, but since she is not captivating or compelling in any way, shape, or form, she just evaporates every time she is on camera… which is most of the time.
Suffice it to say, Brosnan fairs much better as the stoic, and mostly silent, villain. He has a creepy T-1000 vibe to him, although it’s comical how he seems perfectly capable of shooting straight, except whenever he’s shooting at Jovovich, then he can’t hit the broadside of an elephant’s ass cheek. The sequence in which he searches for her in an apartment, and doesn’t even think to check around the large sofa that she’s hiding behind, provides the movie one of its few moments of laugh-out-loud stupidity. As good as Brosnan is, he doesn’t make the excruciatingly dull cat-and-mouse plotting any more bearable, and if you really want to see him playing “Evil James Bond,” you’d be better off checking out The Tailor of Panama, a complex but engaging thriller that’s infinitely more worthy of your time.
As for the rest of the cast, Angela Bassett just grates on the nerves and wastes screen time as a stereotypical, thick-headed bureaucrat, Dylan McDermott, as Jovovich’s immediate superior, spends most of his time standing around looking confused before getting knocked the fuck out by a falling door (don’t ask), and Robert Forster pops in just long enough to show off how much hair he’s lost since the last time we saw him in anything. These usually fine thespians are just cashing checks here, folks, nothing more, and maybe a little less.
Survivor is a comatose thriller that will bore you to tears as you watch it, and then leave you wracking your brain once it’s over, just to remember anything that happened in it. Even at a seemingly slim 90 minutes, it is still an insufferable slog to sit through, and may very well be the final nail in the coffin of James McTeigue’s directing career. Now I could go on and bitch about the block of text that comes at the end of the film, the one that insultingly attempts to tie the events of the picture in with real world terrorism, but this straight-to-streaming snoozer really isn’t worth it.
