'The Statement'
Unconvincing

IN THEORY ANY thriller based on a Brian Moore novel involving a real-life war criminal living underground ought to be perfect Friday-night fare. You've got assassination attempts and international intrigue, rooftop chases and narrow escapes, shadowy organizations and judicial moral crusaders piecing together puzzles clue by cryptic clue – in other words, the sure-thing recipe for a great cat-and-mouse nail-biter. What looks great on paper doesn't always translate to the screen, however, and even something with all the right ingredients can be overbaked into a burnt offering. It's not like this terse tale of ex-Vichy policeman-wartime Nazi collaborator Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine) on the run from both mysterious gunmen and two dogged do-gooders (Jeremy Northam, Tilda Swinton) doesn't come with a good pedigree, what with the mighty Caine, a smattering of British acting talent on board for support, and director Norman Jewison (the original Thomas Crown Affair) working everything into a lather. It just makes this rather third-rate version of The Third Man all the more confusing as the acting starts showing its seams, the dialogue seems composed of one wooden plank after another (at one point Brossard is in the midst of a heart attack and utters, for what one might guess is to benefit any blind people in the audience, "I'm having a heart attack!"), and the heavy-handed conspiracy aspect involving a secret society in the Catholic Church just sinks like a stone. There's something almost quaint about the film's attempt at fashioning an old-school Euro potbolier – the kind where intertitles announce new continental locations every five minutes – but all this running around coastal scenery in a France conspicuously populated by posh English accents eventually feels like a travelogue treadmill, an endless series of postcards posing as a slack suspense airplane read that goes round in circles. (David Fear)