Survivor ** (2015, Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Frances de la Tour, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Roger Rees) – Movie Review

Milla Jovovich stars as a kickass US State Department employee whose job on her new posted to the American embassy in London is stopping terrorists from getting into the US.

With her brilliant instincts, she smells a rat, and tries to prevent dodgy Romanian Emil Balan (Roger Rees) getting into the States. But her intervention brings a world-class deadly assassin, known as The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan), relentlessly after her.

She is framed for crimes she did not commit and forced to go on the run, but a couple of her State Department buddies (Dylan McDermott, Frances de la Tour) are on her side and can help her. Bodies pile up around her as she tries to clear her name and, it turns out, prevent a large-scale terrorist attack on New York on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. By the end of the movie, will she be The Survivor?

V for Vendetta director James McTeigue has the skills to turn in a slick, watchable, fast-moving action thriller starting from a good setup and employing some good actors. But he hasn’t the skills to turn Philip Shelby’s mediocre screenplay, with its shaky dialogue, cardboard characters and clumsy plotting, into a winner. He’s not a magician!

Still, Jovovich is reliably tough and a good action heroine, as usual, as well as reasonably credible under the circumstances, and Brosnan is clearly enjoying playing the bad guy. And it’s all over in a quick 90 minutes. It recalls The Spooks movie, but it’s not nearly as good. Star roles for Angela Bassett as the US Ambassador and Robert Forster are not well developed, wasting the actors.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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