While it's not in the same class as "Gorky Park" (1983), fans of that film will find many of the same story elements, locations, and production design in "Silent Partner" (2005). It is yet another story of greedy corruption in the post-Communist Soviet Union and like "Gorky Park" it is professionally made with an expensive look and feel.
With a 96-minute running length "Silent Partner" is one of the few films that would not benefit from a little trimming. In fact, by the end you suspect that there has already been considerable trimming; and that the price for keeping all the expensively staged action sequences is the loss of so much narrative material and character development sequences that the story borders on incomprehensible.
It might be useful to keep pen and paper handy during your initial viewing, carefully tracking the assorted physically indistinguishable characters that enter and leave the film without explanation or background details, and then reappear in later sequences. But even this would not enable anyone to adequately sort through the confusion, because it is like tracking a bunch of identical size ants milling around an anthill.
Apparently all this is not in the service of making the story a mental challenge for the viewer. At the end you are supposed to sort through the Hitchcock MacGuffin's and think how cleverly they fooled you. But all they really did was keep you in a state of dazed ignorance because you were not told enough about the motivations and the basic premise to have anticipated much of anything. This means almost every development in the story is its own little "deux ex machina" moment; "a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object".
In a nutshell, CIA intelligence analyst Gordon Patrick (Nick Moran) is sent to Moscow to investigate of the suicide of Russia's Minister of Finance, Mikhail Garin. The suicide occurred just before the renewal of a massive loan program between the two countries, which has been placed on hold pending Patrick's review of the incident. You learn that the relatively inexperienced agent was chosen by high-level Russian and American interests because he is expected to simply rubber stamp the results of the Soviet's own investigation.
But just prior to his death, Garin entrusted his unsavory daughter Dina (Tara Reid) with a brief case of secrets, which she is trying to turn over to Patrick.
The main problem is that while the crew is good at setting up great shots and staging decent action scenes, the writer/director James D. Deck and the editor are pretty much clueless about how to tell a comprehensible story, build suspense, or make dramatic revelations.
For example, midway into the film Patrick and Dina are being hunted by a nefarious group of agents and/or police (or maybe mercenaries, or maybe police who are moonlighting as mercenaries, or maybe some who are and some are not, or maybe ???), it is never really explained. Gordon wants to come out of the cold and he phones home to set up a meeting at a local restaurant. Things go badly and there is blazing shootout with all sorts of good guys and bad guys banging away at each other with machine guns and running around like a bunch of scalded chimps. No sooner is one guy shot than somebody entirely new to the story pops up from somewhere to continue the fight. Although you can't really tell the bad people from the good people, the real problem for a viewer is that it is impossible to gauge the progress of the confrontation, the director has not bothered to provide even the most basic information about the extent of each side's immediate tactical resources.
Deck needs to be told by his producers that while confusion has its place in a movie, substituting it for suspense is not a good idea.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.
With a 96-minute running length "Silent Partner" is one of the few films that would not benefit from a little trimming. In fact, by the end you suspect that there has already been considerable trimming; and that the price for keeping all the expensively staged action sequences is the loss of so much narrative material and character development sequences that the story borders on incomprehensible.
It might be useful to keep pen and paper handy during your initial viewing, carefully tracking the assorted physically indistinguishable characters that enter and leave the film without explanation or background details, and then reappear in later sequences. But even this would not enable anyone to adequately sort through the confusion, because it is like tracking a bunch of identical size ants milling around an anthill.
Apparently all this is not in the service of making the story a mental challenge for the viewer. At the end you are supposed to sort through the Hitchcock MacGuffin's and think how cleverly they fooled you. But all they really did was keep you in a state of dazed ignorance because you were not told enough about the motivations and the basic premise to have anticipated much of anything. This means almost every development in the story is its own little "deux ex machina" moment; "a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object".
In a nutshell, CIA intelligence analyst Gordon Patrick (Nick Moran) is sent to Moscow to investigate of the suicide of Russia's Minister of Finance, Mikhail Garin. The suicide occurred just before the renewal of a massive loan program between the two countries, which has been placed on hold pending Patrick's review of the incident. You learn that the relatively inexperienced agent was chosen by high-level Russian and American interests because he is expected to simply rubber stamp the results of the Soviet's own investigation.
But just prior to his death, Garin entrusted his unsavory daughter Dina (Tara Reid) with a brief case of secrets, which she is trying to turn over to Patrick.
The main problem is that while the crew is good at setting up great shots and staging decent action scenes, the writer/director James D. Deck and the editor are pretty much clueless about how to tell a comprehensible story, build suspense, or make dramatic revelations.
For example, midway into the film Patrick and Dina are being hunted by a nefarious group of agents and/or police (or maybe mercenaries, or maybe police who are moonlighting as mercenaries, or maybe some who are and some are not, or maybe ???), it is never really explained. Gordon wants to come out of the cold and he phones home to set up a meeting at a local restaurant. Things go badly and there is blazing shootout with all sorts of good guys and bad guys banging away at each other with machine guns and running around like a bunch of scalded chimps. No sooner is one guy shot than somebody entirely new to the story pops up from somewhere to continue the fight. Although you can't really tell the bad people from the good people, the real problem for a viewer is that it is impossible to gauge the progress of the confrontation, the director has not bothered to provide even the most basic information about the extent of each side's immediate tactical resources.
Deck needs to be told by his producers that while confusion has its place in a movie, substituting it for suspense is not a good idea.
Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.