‘Unlocked,’ a New Spy Thriller, Same as the Old Spy Thrillers
The spy thriller “Unlocked” is an apt and not entirely unentertaining demonstration of the adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” The movie has a female lead (Alice Racine, played by Noomi Rapace) as its intrepid, smart, lethal spy, so that’s something. Instead of Cold War chess moves in the mode of “Funeral in Berlin,” it serves up the ostensible threat of Islamist terror. Racine is an undercover C.I.A. agent posing as an employment counselor in London. She’s loath to do fieldwork because she feels responsible for not thwarting a terrorist strike in Paris years ago. But she’s pulled back in by the prospect of a horrifying biological attack. She needs to interrogate — “unlock” in spy-speak — a courier whose message could set the plan in motion, or stop it.
And here the movie goes very old school, piling on spy thriller tropes: double crosses; chases; a stock taciturn white-haired would-be assassin (who, conveniently enough, can’t quite draw a bead on our heroine); an eager recruit who might as well be nicknamed Dead Meat; and dialogue like “I’m thinking I’m the only friend you’ve got.”
I suppose this went down easily enough for me because I grew up with this kind of stuff, and can surrender to it as a kind of cinematic comfort food. But still. For those not so inclined, the entertainment value could conceivably be derived from the brisk, no-nonsense direction by Michael Apted, and the talents of what they used to call “an all-star cast” — in this case, Michael Douglas, Toni Collette, John Malkovich and Orlando Bloom.
-New York Times
