‘Damascus Cover’: Film Review

3:11 PM PDT 7/4/2018 by Stephen Dalton Jonathan Rhys Meyers performs an undercover Mossad agent on a lethal mission to Syria in Daniel Zelik Berk’s interval spy thriller. Touted as a possible future James Bond on numerous events during the last decade, Jonathan Rhys Meyers seems to have made his audition reel in Damascus Cowl, a lumbering old-school spy thriller by Israeli writer-director Daniel Zelik Berk. Based mostly on a 1977 novel by Howard Kaplan, however with a plot up to date to the tip of the Chilly Struggle, Berk’s debut cinematic function is overstuffed with groaningly acquainted espionage tropes. Even with its modestly starry forged, together with a last display credit score for the late John Harm, audiences are unlikely to be both shaken or stirred when Vertical Leisure open the movie in theaters on July 20. Rhys Meyers stars as Ari Ben-Zion, an undercover Israeli spy dwelling below a pretend German identification in late 1980s Berlin. Simply because the Berlin Wall falls, he botches his mission to carry again a treacherous double agent alive. Recalled to Tel Aviv below a darkish cloud, Ari’s skilled competence and psychological welfare come into query. Desirous to show himself to his wily Mossad boss Miki (John Harm), Ari volunteers for a harmful job behind enemy traces, with the intention of smuggling a chemical substances weapons scientist and his household out of Syria. Arriving in Damascus, he poses as a German carpet importer with neo-Nazi sympathies, which brings him into contact with suave former Nazi Franz Ludin (Jurgen Prochnow). He additionally encounters flirtatious American photojournalist Kim (Olivia Thirlby), who appears immediately eager on dragging Ari into her darkish room and seeing what develops. Betraying its 1970s supply materials with each creaky line and clunky plot twist, Damascus Cowl is a pedestrian effort throughout the board. Berk seems to be taking type and temper cues from the Jason Bourne movies, which had been equally conservative prospects at coronary heart, however he plainly lacks the directing panache and beneficiant funds required to glam up this dowdy outdated potboiler into an attractive fashionable spy thriller. The motion scenes are threadbare, counting on stagey hand-to-hand fight and scrappy gunfights, whereas the stilted romance between Ari and Kim feels wholly implausible and low on sizzle. The Nazi subplot, central to Kaplan’s e-book, additionally melts away into insignificance right here. In its favor, Damascus Cowl is handsomely shot in summery colours by cinematographer Chloe Thomson, who makes resourceful use of aerial drone footage of Berlin, Tel Aviv and Casablanca, which stands in for Damascus. Harm strikes a reliably elegiac be aware in a whiskery supporting position which, as with most of his autumnal work, elevates mediocre materials by just a few notches. And Rhys Meyers appears to be like male-model attractive in a sequence of sharp fitted fits, though his cold, stiff efficiency largely consists of pulling variations on Derek Zoolander’s signature Blue Metal look. Thirlby is the one actual firecracker right here, bringing a compellingly nervy ambiguity to a personality whose divided loyalties are thuddingly foreshadowed proper from her first scene. Damascus Cowl ends on a evenly cynical twist meant to critique the morally doubtful backstage deal-making behind superpower spy video games. Sadly, Berk’s stale screenplay merely lacks the heft or depth to carry it above third-hand homage to earlier, higher, smarter movies. On the energy of this flimsy star automobile, Rhys Meyers is not going to be sipping dry martinis in a tuxedo any time quickly. Manufacturing corporations: Xeitgeist Leisure Group, Marcys Holdings, BBMForged: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Olivia Thirlby, John Harm, Jurgen Prochnow, Igal Naor, Navid NegahbanDirector: Daniel Zelik BerkScreenwriters: Daniel Zelik Berk, Samantha NewtonProducers: Huw Penallt Jones. Hannah Chief, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Joe ThomasCinematographer: Chloe ThomsonEditor: Martin BrinklerMusic: Harry Escott93 minutes   http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/reviews/film/~3/7UaTq_wzb3M/damascus-cover-review-1125011