Another certainty: death, taxes, and Aaron Eckhart in any film that involves a grieving CIA spouse, which conveniently offers little intrigue to merit being placed in theaters anywhere. With such movies the only real sense of dignity that can be defended is when the directors are not as unimaginative as Roel Reiné who directed the movie “Classified” which – surprise surprise – showcases Eckhart as another CIA operative dealing with the tragic loss of his wife.
As the B-Movie Acting Guide states Eckhart in Classified doesn’t even attempt to redirect the way his squinty eyes and the way he knows how to emit a Clint Eastwood grumble. Unsurprisingly, he continues to utilize this role in Evan Shaw, a CIA operative who sleeps with a gun, stapling wounds, to work under a “move fast and don’t think” kind of philosophy. Evan lost his wife and now walks around in black and appears to be a bad Hollywood reimagining of the Sad Batman meme. After all, as one may even point out, there is no shame in that.
However, the script by Bob DeRosa, who also wrote the McG picture, KILLERS, featuring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher, throws in a bunch of tired action thriller cliches, lamely choreographed fistfights, soundless shootouts and an out-of-place Abigail Breslin. The positive aspect to this is that whichever financial incentives the country of Malta is currently offering to attract foreign film productions do seem to be paying off as Classified’s Malta exteriors are really quite attractive looking landscapes.
There are 29 executive producers for this film as unhinged as that number as it seems, this also highlights the difficulty of even getting this mediocre film made in the first place and somewhat diverts our attention from meeting Shaw. He’s a hired assassin working for the CIA and doesn’t ask questions for the last 20 years he’s been in service and has been following a coded advertisement to get orders for his hits.
He takes the briefcase and opens it; it’s filled with guns, and then kills a president or a director of the company every now and then. Shaw’s naive loyalty to his CIA head tim roth, who seems to have no motivation other than to sit and enjoy himself on location, for the past twenty-two years may be far-fetched but it’s plausible since it creates a scenario about disloyalty and grumpy CEOs.
As could be expected, and entirely unsurprising, such low-hanging villainous fruit was not dwelt upon too long because it had been too often done by this stage in the movie. What is done too often otherwise is an endless series of shootouts, chase scenes, and punches cut together in a borderline amateur style as done by Radu Ion. The plot thickens when the camera zooms out to reveal Kacey, played by almost 50 cent, an MI6 analyst stating that the office which employed Evan to do jobs all over the world hasn’t been operational for a while: now viewers are left in suspense. From what office have these orders been given and why does Evan readily agrees to work with Kacey in searching for the answer?
The emotional weight that B-movies offer, as well as their characters’ complexity, is not something that Kacey’s audience can expect, so it’s understandable they won’t feel sorry to find out Kacey is, which is not even a secret as it appears on the film’s wiki page, Evan’s daughter lost in time. Breslin does manage to deliver some much appreciated comedic and loose energy in fluctuating this taut thriller, but we do not have faith in the fact that even with Evan’s help, Kacey would be able to come out from the endless attack on her life that she will be placed into and remain unharmed. What helps is that both Evan and Kacey are being chased by the usual stereotypical villains such as the incompetent and unskilled men in black who only seem to know how to shoot a gun, somewhere, but not necessarily at the target.
In no time, Evan and Kacey climb the ladder of criminals, and as they do, the gaps in their narrative are filled with unquestionable-funny- ADR utterances- ‘Are you sure the elder is not going to skin us alive?’ Certainly, while Classified once again demonstrates that the simplest digitally presented piece of work can look like art and that a drone is an essential component for tagging along cost effectiveness while portraying large expanse which no better work manages to cover, it turns out that it does not make up for the other shortcomings of the work. Reiné’s efforts behind the camera are not able to create suspense even remotely similar to what a low budget studio film would manage, and the music which is rather melancholic and which I guess is intended to show Evan’s pain, does not help in increasing the tension either.
Evan in DeRosa’s trailer full of threats and plenty of drama is pictured as “a good little soldier” turned cynical who seems to have believed in a created image of a country where everything is fine and that he is being controlled by some company and not the government. Classified really struggles to persuade us to believe these far from revolutionary claims are anything but half-hearted lip-service. And that is harder to ignore when you consider there is also no satisfaction in the emotional aspect of Evan reuniting with his daughter.
These concepts are clearly not the priorities. The priority is providing cheap excitement for those who just want to see a frowning Aaron Eckhart with plenty of bullets to hurl concrete dust into the air. For the rest of us, we are forced to sit through the extenuated spooning with disinterested members as Eckhart chooses his next role as a broken-hearted CIA agent.
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