Movie Review – Chief of Station
Principal Cast : Aaron Eckhart, Alex Pettyfer, Olga Kurylenko, Chris Petrovski, Laetitia Eido, Nick Moran, Jonathan Ajayi, Daniel Bernhardy, Nina Bergman, James Faulkner, Kris Johnson, Isobel Wood.
Synopsis: After learning that the death of his wife was not an accident, a former CIA Station Chief is forced back into the espionage underworld, teaming up with an adversary to unravel a conspiracy that challenges everything he thought he knew.
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Jesse V Johnson’s potboiler Euro-thriller Chief of Station is the kind of film that proves just how spoiled modern audiences are to have a surfeit of great, terrific, and masterful spy-espionage genre films to choose from – because this film is not among them. From a script that feels like somebody asked Chat-GPT to cobble together as generic and bland a spy thriller as it could muster, a litany of clichés, ponderous verbal meanderings and dead-end plot points form the incohesive whole of this directionless dross. Aaron Eckhart, who is rapidly modern cinema’s Timu Liam Neeson, stumbles and growls through what is an thoroughly boring filmed debacle. Far be it for me to second-guess the filmmakers in spending a cheap dollar for nothing, but this film looks entirely like a tax write-off filmed for no other reason than creative blackmail.
Eckhart plays CIA Chief of Station agent Ben Malloy, whose wife, Farrah (Laetitia Eido), a fellow CIA Agent, is killed in a building explosion in Budapest. After he discovers that the explosion was not an accident, Ben returns to Europe to track down a variety of clues leading to those responsible; along the way, he is helped by fellow CIA agent Desmond Jackson (Jonathan Ajayi), a Russian agent, Krystyna Kowerski (Olga Kurylenko) and ostensibly Ben’s former colleague John Branca (Alex Pettyfer), while rogue operative and one-time enemy Evgeny (Nick Moran) overturns the playpen as the primary antagonist. In a separate subplot, Ben’s son Nick (Chris Petrovski) is taken from his home and held hostage as the bad guys seek to gain information.
Chief of Station is a formless, aimless mess. It’s cheaply made, poorly directed, and filled with humourless, lowbrow boilerplate espionage nonsense in which “nobody is a good guy” routinely becomes the aesthetic. The film operates on two seemingly incongruous plot lines – the primary being that of Eckhart’s Ben, tracking down who killed his wife and running into more convenient plot twists than I’ve had reviews on this website. The secondary plot line involves the kidnapping of Ben’s son, played by Chris Petrovski, in what can only be described as the most unnecessary character and narrative exertion I’ve seen in years. The fact that Ben and Nick have some discordant fractured relationship is intimated but Jesse V Johnson isn’t a strong enough dramatic director to make both halves feel like they belong together. The kidnapped son story arc plays like a half-forgotten thought, as if they needed something diversionary to do while Eckhart was moving from place to place on his own mission. At one point I was kinda hoping they killed off the son to give the film a little more dramatic urgency, but alas, the kid makes it. Even the Stateside sequences in the CIA (shot in what looks like an abandoned school campus) feel like wading through molasses, with exposition and character development coming in the vaguest of notions with the least credible dialogue delivery I’ve seen in ages. The script, credited to George Mahaffey, plays like a shitty John le Carre knock-off without the pizazz.
Had the script – as woeful and workmanlike as it is – been placed in the hands of a half-competent director, a director more able to grasp the style of an action film rather than this mismatched tonal abortion, Chief of Station could have been a ripping little thriller that packed a punch. Eckhart has more than proven he has the gravitas to match it alongside the screen’s best leading men, and is given a bit to do in the hand-to-hand combat stakes that makes up for a deficit of intelligent subterfuge. This could have played like a razor-wire Taken-esque gut punch, in the hands of somebody capable of propelling the film’s dim script into a frenzy of action. Yet, the films’ action sequences are terrible: clumsily paced, awkwardly framed and edited, and showcasing what feels like a limited shoot schedule meaning rehearsals and training may have been absent indeed. It just never seems to get out of first gear – bruising combat sequences between Ben and several bad guys feel like poor man’s John Wick or Jason Bourne, two franchises that set the bar high for the on-screen talent being able to deliver on the action in-camera, whereas while Eckhart seems capable of delivering a punishing fight sequence the camerawork, editing and choice of shots to use is… well, it’s lamentable. There’s no urgency to the film, no sense of speed or rising tension. It just sits there, inertly being something and disengaging from the viewer with each vacuous, nonsensical step.
I guess if one was to squint and try and come up with a positive to say is that it’s so bland and inoffensively dull you hardly remember what’s happening. From the cringeworthy opening sequence in which a squad of goons tries to intercept an intelligence package in a crowded market to a gormless, nonsensical “final battle” in what looks like a disused grain storage facility from the 1950’s, almost nothing about this film elevates the genre, elicits excitement, or in any way pays off the time investment the viewer will make by switching this on. The addition of Olga Kurylenko in one of the more thankless roles I’ve seen her in (and she’s been in some genuine shit over the years) offers nothing, while Alex Pettyfer plays the least convincing bad guy reveal in history, a perfect douchebag we could spot from a mile away. My god this film is horrendous, what an absolute waste of everyone’s time and energy putting it together. I don’t consider myself to be a filmmaker in the slightest but I understand how to construct a scene and execute it, and Jesse V Johnson’s work here is second-rate. The whole time I was watching this thing I could feel myself putting together how I would have shot it, how I would have made it more energetic (if not any smarter) to keep the viewer engaged. Again, I think the film’s budget plays against it.
Shoddy, unconvincing and a dumpster-fire of clichés, tropes and generic ideas, there’s nothing about Chief of Station that makes it a film I can recommend. Eckhart does his best but this is a film he’s accepted for a paycheck, and by golly I hope he got paid well, because this does nothing at all for his career. It’s a careening car-crash of a film, a laboured, offensively stupid subgenre piece; an artless, hackneyed piece of derivative junk, Chief of Station should be avoided, and hard.
Who wrote this?
