Agent Game
SABAN FILMSA memo must have been passed around the various sub-par offices of production companies making action features that convinced directors and producers that characters need only one name. It is cool to lack a surname, as Harris (Dermot Mulroney), Kavinsky (Adan Canto), Olsen (Mel Gibson), and most extraordinarily of all, Bill (Jason Isaacs) will tell you. Agent Game has that and that alone as its crux. It cannot powder up its action or set pieces, instead, it must rely on the notion that characters are more relatable if audiences don’t have to remember their full names. Ditch the middleman, don’t even give them a birth name, just fire through on the vaguely recognisable faces, the implications of action rather than the showcase of it, and the banal writing that comes with it. Another glorious ride out for the action genre.
Naturally, it is not the fault of those on-screen, who must deal with director Grant S. Johnson and his inability to add layers to characters or their surroundings. Agent Game will struggle extremely frequently to add any form of character or hope to these stars. Up to its eyeballs in cliché, Agent Game has the wildly misplaced confidence to have its first line of dialogue be Gibson, looking solemn and pretending to be out of breath, muttering: “We have a problem.” There is certainly a problem. It is not the one Agent Game concerns itself with though, of interrogations and subterfuge, but of quality elsewhere. The usual pitfalls of the action genre, the low-budget thriller that tries to contain within it both appealing and broad action as well as some layer of cinematic progress.
Agent Game has more progress made than most in this straight-to-video genre. At the very least the Bruce Willis-role, the man that shows up for little, if any of the running time, is filled with purpose. Gibson features just as sporadically as the great, aforementioned actor, but adds a little extra here or there. His inclusion at the beginning is mysterious and too telling of the danger set out ahead of him, but Agent Game can build on those important moments. Mulroney and Canto are engaged with this at least and for all the neon-lit strangeness and the extreme-close ups that add little, if anything, the rest of the direction comes through with fine clarity. It is still a barbaric and embarrassing piece of film, but one that has more than a few moments to keep its head above ground.
Nowhere near as many as the usual competent affair though, and Agent Game soon suffers not from tonal whiplash but an apparent paralysis of not knowing where to go next. It feels a bit tongue-in-cheek at times, mocking itself and the films around it. The flower van used as a place to hide the secret agents, the villain with a piano set in front of a fireplace and an opening that relies neatly on its ending and vice versa. There are smart claims throughout this Johnson feature, but what good will that do when Agent Game fails to overcome the clear and repetitive problems the straight-to-VOD action genre will always have stuck to it?