Mon 23 Jul 2018
Movie Review: DAMASCUS COVER (2017).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Suspense & espionage films[9] Comments
DAMASCUS COVER. World premiere: Boston Film Festival, September 2017. Theatrical release: Vertical Entertainment, US, 20 July 2018. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Olivia Thirlby, Jürgen Prochnow, Igal Naor, Navid Negahban, John Hurt (his last film). Based on the novel by Howard Kaplan (1977). Director: Daniel Zelik Berk.
Based on the evidence provided by this Israeli-produced espionage thriller, if you’re an author, you should never give up on having your book adapted into a movie. Forty years is an awfully long time, though!
The book was written in 1977, but the film is updated to 1989, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a young Mossad agent who is assigned the task of going into Syria undercover to rescue a chemical scientist and his family. Posing as a German named Hans Hoffmann, he moves from one contact to another with some success, meeting a charming American photojournalist (played by Olivia Thirlby) along the way. The problem is, in all stories of this kind, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
His superior, a bewhiskered old gentleman known only as Miki (John Hurt), has other plans for the mission. There are plenty of twists to the tale, a definite throwback to the many spy films of the 1960s and 70s — the serious ones such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold— not that I’m claiming that this film is anywhere near that caliber, but I don’t want you to think that the people involving in making it had the James Bond motif in mind when they did, or any other imitations of the latter.
With Casablanca standing in for Damascus in the filming, there is a small subplot involving Nazi war criminals living in Assad’s Syria that I believe is more developed in the novel than in it is in the film.
The movie is far from perfect — it is a little confusing at times — but it is well-filmed, and even if the story line has been well-mined before now, if you enjoyed movies that have fallen in this category in the past, you can sit back and enjoy this venture into those days of old one more time.
July 23rd, 2018 at 5:10 pm
Sounds like a rehash of the Eli Cohen affair and Morris L. West’s TOWER OF BABEL with the historical perspective removed.
July 23rd, 2018 at 7:06 pm
Not knowing much about the Cohen affair nor the West book, I can’t say anything one way or the other about either.
I have discovered that Howard Kaplan the author of the book the film is based on is alive and well at 69 years old, and is mostly very happy with the adaptation.
The reviews I have seen, however, are almost all negative, some almost vicious. It has a rating of less than 10% on rottentomatos, for example, but a respectable 6.7 rating from viewers on IMDb.
I don’t understand the negativity from the critics. I’d give it a 6 or 7 myself. I don’t know what kind of distribution it’s going to get, but — speaking to everybody reading this — if it plays near you and you’re considering going — listen to the viewers, not the critics.
July 24th, 2018 at 12:16 am
I wonder if this was the great Sir John Hurt’s final performance as he died January 2017.
No one should judge a film based on its trailer but the trailer sure showed the film hits all the old movie spy tropes. Without a studio backing I suspect the first chance many will get to see this will be on HBO or Showtime. It also may be a tell that this “award winner” was not scheduled for the fall when the best films worthy of Oscar are shown and instead airs during summer when studio blockbusters dominate.
July 24th, 2018 at 1:59 am
I wondered why you referred to this film as an “award winner” and talked about the Oscars — I didn’t think I touted it anywhere nearly that highly.
Then I watched one of the trailers for the movie, and yes I saw that it did win some awards at a film festival somewhere — Boston perhaps — before it had its official release. I don’t know if this is the one you saw, Michael, but I thought I’d make it easier for everyone to find. Here it is:
July 24th, 2018 at 8:45 am
Steve,
Cohen was a Mossad agent who was embedded deep in Damascus as an Arab businessman. He eventually was caught and executed, but not until after he had some spectacular successes. There was a television movie about him with John Shea playing Cohen.
TOWER OF BABEL was one of a string of bestsellers by Morris L. West (SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN, DAUGHTERS OF SILENCE, THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, SALAMANDER), a fictional account of the Cohen story that was optioned by MGM at the same time as Greene’s THE COMEDIANS, but unlike that one never filmed even though director Peter Glenville was set to direct.
Cohen is something of a legend in intelligence circles for his success as a high profile agent in place, and his martyrdom when he was caught.
July 24th, 2018 at 12:10 pm
Thanks for this, David. I knew more about Eli Cohen than I thought I did! I don’t want to give away any of the twists of the story told in the movie, but [PLOT WARNING] there is a character in the movie that just might have been inspired by the Cohen story.
July 24th, 2018 at 2:55 pm
Steve, the trailer I watched was at IMdb and I believe this was it.
When a movie is released can be a clue to the quality or type of film it is. Summer is for blockbusters. Fall is for quality Oscar worthy films. January gets Oscar winners. February gets the bombs or the Coen Brothers latest. Spring can vary but often is light weight dramas, comedies, and romances. This is not as hard a rule as it used to be, but this trailer makes it look like a intelligent thriller that will be overwhelmed by blockbusters such as EQUALIZER 2 and is not good enough to compete against the studios Oscar bait films in fall.
It also is not a good sign for a film to win a film festival (even a minor one) and take 11 months to make it to theaters.
And considering the quality of TV-streaming films and series in the spy thriller genre today, I see no appeal of paying money to watch it on the big screen.
July 24th, 2018 at 3:28 pm
You probably won’t have a chance, nor will anyone else not living in L.A. or New York City. Jon and I saw it in L.A. the second or third day of its release, and there were less than a dozen people in the theater.
It will be picked up by one of the cable movie channels, I’m sure, but as far as the big screen is concerned, it’s doomed.
July 24th, 2018 at 4:48 pm
Back in 1989-91 I worked at AMC Century City (Los Angeles) as Customer Host. The movie theatre was the third largest in the country and a major location for the Hollywood elite to watch movies. As host I had to answer questions about the films which meant I got to watch some of the most obscure films of those years. I got to talk a moment with Dennis Hopper about his film BACKTRACK (aka CATCHFIRE) and the legal fight he was having over the final cut.
One of the many reasons I miss Los Angeles. No better place to live for a fan of movies.