Along with death and taxes, another immutable fact of life is that if Aaron Eckhart is starring in a movie he’ll probably play a current or former CIA agent with a murdered wife and the film will go straight to streaming. There is, one can argue, no shame in that unless the films are as consistently mediocre as director Roel Reiné’s Classified, which comes on the heels of the similarly generic Eckhart thrillers Chief of Station and The Bricklayer, where Eckhart also plays a CIA agent with a murdered wife.
As outlined in the B-Movie Acting Guide, Eckhart doesn’t stretch himself in Classified as much as further hone his squinty-eyed stare and Clint Eastwood growl to ensure continued employment as a streaming movie staple. Here he plays Evan Shaw, a CIA operative who sleeps holding a pistol, closes his wounds with a staple gun and operates under a code of conduct that includes original thoughts like “move fast and travel light.” Haunted by the tragic death of his wife and bedecked in black, Evan looks like the Sad Batman meme come to low budget life. There is, one can also argue, no shame in that either.
But the film, written by Bob DeRosa (2010’s Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher-starring quote-unquote comedy, Killers), saddles him with a slew of action thriller clichés, logy fight choreography, dull pew-pew shootouts and a miscast Abigail Breslin. On the upside, whatever financial incentives the country of Malta is dishing out to lure Hollywood productions is working; Classified’s Malta exteriors look awfully pretty.
Typical Tale of Evil Government and Greedy Corporations
A CIA hit man uses the classified section in newspapers to receive his assignments. When he learns the shocking news that his boss has been dead for years, he tries to find out whose orders he’s been executing.
Release Date October 22, 2024
Runtime 1h 45m
Pros
- It’s always a pleasure to see Tim Roth even when he’s barely trying.
- Plenty of flying bullets and fists, for what it?s worth.
- Its Malta locations look beautiful.
Cons
- Abigail Breslin is miscast as a reluctant action heroine.
- The boilerplate script contains lots of action clichés and no surprises.
- The bad guys are generic.
The film’s opening credits list 29 executive producers, a gargantuan number that reminds us how difficult it is to get a movie even this middling off the ground and also distracts us momentarily from our introduction to Shaw. He’s a lone wolf CIA hitman who has spent the last 20 years asking no questions as he dutifully scours the classified ads for coded messages containing the identity of the next person he’s contracted to kill.
After receiving his assignment, he retrieves a briefcase filled with weapons and then goes about assassinating a head of state or the occasional CEO. Shaw’s almost quarter-century of blind faith in his CIA boss (a lollygagging Tim Roth, usually excellent, here looking like he signed on just to hang out in Malta) may be improbable, but it’s workable enough as it sets up a story that turns on government betrayal and evil corporations.
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Unsurprisingly, such low-hanging villainous fruit is given short shrift in favor of the inevitable parade of shootouts, chase scenes, and fisticuffs edited at an energy-sapping pace by Radu Ion. What gets us to these extended, digitally enhanced headshots and car crashes is the introduction of Kacey (Breslin), an MI6 analyst who claims that the government office that’s been sending Evan his assignments has long ceased to exist. That begs the question of who’s been giving him his orders, with Evan reluctantly teaming up with Kacey to find the answer.
Eckhart’s Story Is Hard to Care About
Emotional resonance and character depth are not trademarks of B-movies, so forgive our lack of sympathy upon learning that Kacey is (not a spoiler, it’s on the film’s wiki page) Evan’s long-lost daughter. Breslin adds some much-needed humor and loose energy to this clench-jawed thriller, but she lacks the physicality to make us believe that, even under Evan’s protection, Kacey would survive the nonstop barrage of bullets that await her. What helps is that the black-clad rifle-toting bad guys pursuing them are the usual assortment of crappy shots and their handheld combat skills have been visibly dumbed-down to allow Breslin and the 56-year-old Eckhart to partake in them.
Soon, Evan and Kacey work their way up the criminal food chain where gaps in storytelling are filled with obvious ADR lines like the hilarious “are you sure the big boss isn’t going to punish us?” Indeed, while Classified further proves that any digitally-captured film can look beautiful and a drone camera is a B-movie’s best friend when trying to cheaply convey scale, it doesn’t compensate for a production’s other failings. Reiné’s camerawork lacks the nerve-jangling power of even a low-budget studio effort and his downbeat score, while presumably meant to convey Evan’s inner turmoil, does nothing to crank up the excitement.
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Classified Works Better as a Trailer than a Feature Length Film
DeRosa’s collection of trailer-ready threats and dramatic proclamations envisions Evan as “a good little soldier” who paid the price for blindly putting his faith in a corrupt government while corporate interests really pull the strings. Classified is hard-pressed to convince us that these hardly-new complaints are anything more than lip-service concepts. And that’s harder to overlook when there’s also no emotional payoff in seeing Evan reconnect with his daughter.
These ideas are not the film’s priority. Its priority is to deliver mindless thrills for those who only require a scowling, up-for-it Aaron Eckhart and lots of bullets that send chunks of concrete flying into the air. The rest of us must endure a film cobbled together from the tired beats contained in a dog-eared action thriller playbook while Eckhart decides what CIA agent with a murdered wife he’s going to play next.
Classified, from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Saban Films, is available to buy or rent on digital beginning October 22.
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