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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 27 June 2013
This article is a review of THE NUMBERS STATION. |
“Keep station safe, keep code safe,” Grey
There was a time in the 1990s when John Cusack looked to be being groomed as a new kind of laidback action star. The deliriously enjoyable GROSSE POINTE BLANK is still one of the great hitman flicks, and CON AIR is unadulterated bedlam, in an age before computer generated imagery replaced stunts, and reduced thrills due to clear fakery (see for example MAN OF STEEL). Of late, unfortunately, Cusack’s work has been patchy, cropping up in the anodyne (2012) and the woeful (THE PAPERBOY). THE NUMBERS STATION does nothing to resurrect his stature, in fact it compounds a mediocre run. Come on John, you’re better than this.
There was a time in the 1990s when John Cusack looked to be being groomed as a new kind of laidback action star. The deliriously enjoyable GROSSE POINTE BLANK is still one of the great hitman flicks, and CON AIR is unadulterated bedlam, in an age before computer generated imagery replaced stunts, and reduced thrills due to clear fakery (see for example MAN OF STEEL). Of late, unfortunately, Cusack’s work has been patchy, cropping up in the anodyne (2012) and the woeful (THE PAPERBOY). THE NUMBERS STATION does nothing to resurrect his stature, in fact it compounds a mediocre run. Come on John, you’re better than this.
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The opening titles tell the audience that governments use numbers stations to send untraceable messages. Jackson, New Jersey, Emerson (Cusack) and Grey (Liam Cunningham – Davos Seaworth in GAME OF THRONES) are sitting in a car as the former decodes such a message. We are not privy to the devices used to receive these. What are they are being ordered to do? “No loose ends,” says Grey. They are tasked with killing one of their own, who has retired sans permission to a life of bar ownership. A witness escapes, and Emerson can’t bring himself to kill the witness’s young daughter, who has also become a witness. Grey kills her anyway. Following me? Guilt-ridden, well, more sullen than he was before the botched operation, Emerson is sent to Suffolk, England to babysit a “broadcaster”, at a numbers station in a disused American army base.
Two months later, we meet the broadcaster, Katherine (Malin Akerman); all chipperness compared to Emerson’s monosyllables. There’s zero chemistry thanks to Cusack’s under-written part. The script seems to barely exist. For such an important and valuable place, the numbers station is drastically lacking in protection. It takes just three assailants to trap them and wreak very minor havoc – we are in no attention to detail, unimaginative territory. (Contrast, say, excellent French thriller, THE NEST, about an assortment of thieves and police under siege, in a warehouse, from an army of brutal criminals.) Why send just three to break in? There are poorly juxtaposed flashbacks explaining how the facility was infiltrated. The loose ends mount up in proportion to dwindling excitement.
There is meant to be some notion of geo-politics at stake. At one point Emerson states that if these assailants succeed, the world will be a different place in the morning. The motiveless, banal baddies don’t help matters. Instead of intriguing, they just add to the ill thought out hotchpotch of ideas. A shame, the three leads deserve more.
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