BAD COMPANY
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1995 Ben Hoffman
This a film about espionage. That used to mean countries spying on each other. But about ten years ago, with the end of the Cold War, the need for spies was no longer as urgent and on one day the CIA laid off a hundred of its employees. As most of us know, being unemployed is not a good situation in which to find oneself and the former CIA spies had to look for other work. What else did they know but spying?
Fortunately, for them, there are still lots of spying jobs available except now it's within our own country with corporations spying on each other and on their own employees. The new head of the CIA has claimed that economic espionage is the hottest current topic in the Intelligence field. And in April 1993 the FBI's industrial case load leaped from ten to five hundred in only nine months. So the film, Bad Company, is not entirely a work of Ross Thomas' imagination.
Nelson Crowe (Laurence Fishburne) is a CIA agent who is in disfavor because he said he turned over some X millions of dollars to "someone" as ordered by the CIA but he has no receipt and the "someone" claims he never got paid. Sounds like the Iran-Contra fiasco.
The Agency tells Crowe to get a job with The Grimes Corporation, get the goods on them and get back his own good standing with the CIA. The Grimes Corporation does all sorts of spying and frequently uses the information it gains to blackmail and pick up a few extra millions for itself here and there. (You cannot trust anyone these days.) That, you will agree, could give spying a bad name.
All would have been well for Crowe who did start out to do an honest job of infiltration but along the way he got a bit greedy himself. This was not entirely unexpected because the President of the Grimes Corp, Vic Grimes (Frank Langella) has as his right-hand "man" an unscrupulous and pretty woman, Margaret Wells (Ellen Barkin).
The dialogue is good, the action moves nicely, the actors are first-class but somehow the film does not come up with that necessary "something" to set it in a class by itself. Maybe it is the number of fornicating scenes and that they seem to go on so long that the tendency is to laugh. That will kill an espionage film in a hurry. Whatever. It could have been a better film.
Directed by Damian Harris.
2.5 bytes 4 Bytes = Absolutely must see. 3 Bytes = Too good to be missed. 2 Bytes = So so. 1 Byte = Save your money.
Ben Hoffman
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