The downside of having an iconic role is that you
aren't likely to find a better role after it's over. It's different from
typecasting. Unlike typecasting, Hamm gets a variety of roles and doesn't look
out of place in them. Whatever he does though, he can't escape the fact that we
all know he's been better elsewhere. Something like his role in Baby Driver
gives me hope that he'll find some success as a character actor in a lot of
great, weird, fun movies. However, I get the feeling that his more natural fit
as a leading man is going to lead to a lot more movies like Million Dollar
Arm or, his latest, Beirut.
At the beginning of the film, Mason Skiles (Jon
Hamm) is a promising U.S. diplomat living it up in Beirut in 1972. He has a
lovely wife, good friends, and even a 13 year old boy he has nearly adopted. It
turns out that the boy has a brother who is a known terrorist. This leads to a
tragic event that leaves his wife dead and his career ruined. A decade later,
Mason is an alcoholic working as a negotiator in minor labor disputes. Out of
the blue, he's offered a lot of money to deliver a speech at American
University in Beirut. Despite vowing never to return there, the money and his
own curiosity convince him to go. There, it's revealed that he's at the center
of a hostage negotiation. A group of terrorists have taken a high level CIA
agent, an old friend of Mason's, and they are requesting Mason by name to
handle he negotiations.
Just about everything in Beirut feels
familiar. It's telling that when I mentioned I was seeing it to a friend, he
assumed I meant 7 Days in Entebbe.
Argo, 7 Days in Entebbe,
American Hustle, and Beirut
are all cut from the same cloth. Even something more modern like Safe House
feels oddly similar. There really is nothing about Beirut that feels
fresh.
That's not to say it's bad. Hamm is good at this
kind of role. Mason has a lot of latter-day Don Draper in him. Rosamund Pike
plays one of Mason's handlers in Beirut. She really should be getting better
roles than this, but it's not the film's fault that she's overqualified for the
role. Character actors like Mark Pellegrino, Dean Norris (with hair!), Shea
Whigham, and Douglas Hodge fit well in this world too. They all feel like the Charlie
Wilson's War alternates. The most impressive part of the movie is how it
shows all the competing forces in Beirut. There's factions within the US government with different priorities, there's ethnic groups that are at odds
with one another, and there's governments and rebels who are fundamentally
opposed. And they all have some part of the negotiations. It really feeling
like Hamm and company are trying to play 3 dimensional chess.
Besides the all-around generic feel of the movie,
what I had the most trouble with is that I didn't buy Mason as a master
negotiator. The movie works hard to establish that he is. There's a scene or
two where he verbalizes all the tactics someone is using, which proves that he
knows every trick in the book. There's a scene in which he correctly predicts
each of the other side's next steps. There just weren't any "oh damn"
moments: moments that made me grin because I was watching a master finally
getting his mojo back. It's the difference between knowing the book and writing
the book, if that makes any sense. Perhaps I'm using all the time Don Draper wowed
me with pitches unfairly against this movie.
I was hoping that Beirut would be my April
surprise, like Free Fire last year
or Eye in the Sky the year
before. Instead, it's exactly what I expected. No bad. Not great. Just watchable,
especially if you like Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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