At one point when I was just discovering how amazing cinema was, I was a huge fan of the classic Seventies political thrillers like The Parallax View this harks back to at times. I probably still am, though I haven’t even so much as watched All The President’s Men as recently as I’d like. Perhaps needless to say, at this time of year, with a no-name director at the helm, a title that doesn’t quite gel, and despite the cast, I really didn’t expect this to even touch those classics. Well, to be as brisk with my point as the movie itself is at 86 minutes … I was very pleasantly surprised.

To call this a thriller is an understatement. There’s one point – you’ll know it when you see it, I don’t wanna spoil anything but let’s just say “little girl, middle of the road” – where I literally almost started hyperventilating. As you may have heard, the movie covers the same succession of events – the shooting of a president followed by a series of explosions somewhere in Spain – from multiple points of view. On more than one occasion, these snippets reach an unbearable peak only to freeze and “wind back” to another perspective just before the end is revealed. It’s at times overwhelmingly effective, and to say it’s a movie with twists is the second understatement you could make of it.

For me, it’s the Forest Whitaker “segment” that will really stay with me and that I’ll come back for. It’s always interesting to see what actors do after they win an Oscar and while this does slightly follow the old, “now I’ll do a dumb blockbuster” thing that I think began with Nicolas Cage following Leaving Las Vegas with The Rock, I think more interesting here is how vastly different Whitaker’s character is here from Idi Armin. He plays almost literally a nobody who just happens to get caught up in the story and he does it so endearingly and believably I was on the verge of tears just watching him be so natural before the stuff with the little girl.

No, it’s not up there with the 70s classics – it’d need to be 30 minutes longer and put in a blender with either last year’s American Gangster or Zodiac for that. It is, however, the kind of pure ride I haven’t seen in a while. I remember the interviews with Jennifer Garner and Jamie Foxx over last year’s The Kingdom and while I got nothing from that production it almost seems like this is the movie they were selling. I really loved it.

Though it has an array of impressive action sequences and performances , I found this overall just a little too cheesy, especially considering it was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan who wrote the briskly engaging Lions for Lambs. Like, take Jennifer Garner’s character – though I liked her in the role (sorry to sound surprised, I just always still get her mixed up with Jessica Alba and Biel who aren’t quite so consistently impressive), literally the only thing that sets her apart from the others is this huge, “I’m the only woman here!” whine that’s shamefully overdone … here she is bursting into tears in the brief room; here she tells the soldiers not to cross the “pink line”; it feels like we’re meant to be impressed by a woman braving such situations but, oh dear, there she goes again crying over the coffins going home; I find it funny I haven’t got around to finishing this review until after seeing the other day’s “Daily Show” with the thing about Hilary Clinton’s “emotional moment”, ‘cos it’s kinda similarly infuriating, like, look, she’s a woman – see? emotional. Wow. Also, the marble thing I’d been told would be like a “Bruce Willis Sixth Sense moment!” really didn’t wow me much, and the overall message of, “ooh we’re all the same afterall!” was frankly done better in that moment at the end of Volcano when the little boy comments on everyone all caked in ash. Throw it on the “dazzlingly … empty” pile. Suddenly I feel like I’m seeing where all the “it was a bad year” guys were coming from with my recent watchlist. Is it too much to ask for a movie to be a movie from start to finish?