ARGO

In 1979 there was a massive uprising in Iran which resulted in, among other things, the U.S. Embassy being captured and everyone inside being held hostage for 444 days. That's the part everyone knows. But the part that most people don't know, unless they saw Ben Affleck's recent Best Picture winner Argo, is that 6 Americans escaped the Embassy and took shelter in the home of the Canadian ambassador.

Argo's best scenes come early, as the State Department and exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Affleck) toy with the best way to get the 6 out of Tehran. Faced only with bad ideas (like having them bike 300 miles to the border in the dead of night), Mendez concocts one of those ideas-so-crazy-they-work, he and the 6 will pose as location scouts for a fake Canadian sci-fi movie and then leave via the airport.

To help legitimze the cover Mendez travels to LA and enlists the help of a washed up movie producer (Alan Arkin) and Planet of the Apes make-up guru John Chambers (John Goodman). Together the trio set up a fake production company, buy a terrible script and provide light comic relief with publicity stunts.

Argo isn't a bad movie by any means, it's actually pretty entertaining, but most of it's vertures come from Affleck's shrewd direction of what turns out to be a pretty Plain Jane script, despite the crazy premise. Take the hostiges themselves. The 6 "houseguests" get plenty of screen time, but with one exception, they're completely faceless and interchangeable, which is odd considering we're supposed to care what happens to them. It's the plan, and the near-misses that provide the tension rather than the human drama, but it would have been nice to have both.

Affleck does a good job building tension out of what might happen to these people, but it's surprising how little actually happens. All said and done Mendez and Co. have a pretty easy time executing the plan and get more resistance from his CIA superiors than the roving death squads. While the film is based on a true story, no one would confuse it with being an accurate account, so it's hard to understand why Affleck and his screenwriter didn't Hollywood it up some more and make an exceedingly tense thriller rather than just a moderately tense one. It's one of those rare cases that a movie could have used more time to have more stuff going on.

The portrayal of the Iranian's is fair from Hollywood standards, but hardly ideal. I really liked the film's prologue that shows Iran's beef with America as legitimate and understandable. Unfortunately that's the high point. While Affleck does manage to show some Iranians that aren't part of the mob, but the mob itself is a bit faceless. I understand that it's difficult to paint a sensitive portrait of a country in the midst of revolution while also telling a suspense story, but it's disappointing when a film's opening moments promise unusual nuance, and then doesn't follow through, especially when Zero Dark Thirty manages to add immeasurable nuance with just a few small touches.

I understand why Academy Voters went for Argo, it's accessible, entertaining and it doesn't rock the boat, but watching it I kept thinking that it could have been more. It could have been funnier, more suspenseful, and complicated. Instead we're left with a perfectly fine spy story with an out there premise.

Grade: B