Review by Jon Donnis
With Bruce Willis having to take a back seat due to his health, Mel Gibson seems to be the man to step up and take his seat in the "Low Budget, hardly in the film" chair.
The basic synopsis of Agent Game is as follows
"A CIA officer finds himself the target of a rendition operation after being scapegoated for the death of an interrogation subject."
The film starts off with Mel Gibson sat on a bench in the middle of the day, on a quiet street. He sees something, which has him reach for his gun and start shooting at an unknown target. This is also the very final scene of the film, but with added context.
The film does seem to jump between multiple timelines, which adds to the confusion.
CIA Operators Harris and Bill played by Dermot Mulroney and Jason Isaacs answer to the mysterious Olsen character played by Gibson. They are at a black site interrogating Omar (Barkhad Abdi). Omar and his group are connected to terrorism, but Omar is seemingly unaware.
These people will kidnap targets and then move them out of the country.
Another group have orders to kidnap Harris.
As the timelines catch up with each other, I was left a bit confused as to what was going on. Although answers are given towards the end, they were not necessarily to questions I was asking.
It doesn't help that the vast majority of the film seems to be in near darkness. Which made things even harder to follow. This dialog heavy film does have its moments however, towards the end there are some nice explosions, and the action scenes are well done, I would assume this was filmed during the pandemic, and as such actors were kept separate and filmed in chunks, which was then spliced together for the final cut. And with a low budget, it does seem they chose to spend most of the money on a decent cast, as opposed to the actual story or filming. I understand why they did this, but I think that taking your chances with an unknown cast, and spending your money on some lights so we can see what's going on, and better, longer action scenes is worth it in the long run.
The Good
The acting is all solid, everyone involved are professionals, and you will recognise most of them from the typical police procedural tv shows like NCIS, CSI, and stuff like that. Mel Gibson of course is the main name, and is the main draw for the film. Shame he isn't in it much.
The Bad
The Bad
It's just too dark. I had to close curtains, and turn brightness on TV just to see what was going on. The story is overly confusing at times too.
Overall
Agent Game is one of those films that you have to give excuses to because of the low budget and circumstances of the filming.
You will watch this film once, maybe twice to figure out what actually happened.
I score Agent Game is middling 5/10
