There is a certain type of film that defies normal standards of critical judgement; hastily composed because the budget is low but the actors are semi-big names, it features exotic locations and a complicated plot with ultimately inconsequential twists and raises three or four head-scratching questions. In an effort to critically judge such defiant works, it is best to apply the “700 at 35,000” test, which asks, after 12 hours (that is, more than 700 minutes) of sitting in the same airline seat (that is, at 35,000 feet), would watching this film be better than trying to go to sleep?
Damascus Cover is the paradigmatic 700 at 35,000 film. Under ordinary circumstances, it is almost certainly not worth any viewer’s time. Normally, we are just too well-rested, with too many other film and non-film recreational options to sink time into a movie like this one. But, after 700 minutes of surreal wakefulness in the uncomfortable fuselage of a trans-Atlantic passenger jet, with a brain that barely functions and literally nothing else to do, it would be entertaining as hell. The plot holes, strange directorial choices, cringe-worthy acting, lack of clarity regarding languages being spoken and stock characterization just play much better for an addled mind than they do for a regular one.
This spy thriller is set in Damascus just a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ari Ben-Sion (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a Mossad agent pretending to be a German businessman. Everything else about him and his mission is something the film mumbles rather than articulates clearly. He is sent to Damascus to contact a deep-cover Mossad informant, for unknown reasons. Regardless of why he is there, Ari also meets up with Kim (Olivia Thirlby), a supposedly-US-American photojournalist on assignment. Why would a newspaper send a correspondent to Damascus in 1989/1990? Funny the viewer should ask, because no one in the film does. Anyhow, Ari and Kim get embroiled in a multiple-dimensional plot with Syrian intelligence, Mossad double-agents and, for some reason, septuagenarian Nazis who snuck out of Germany after 1945 and made lives for themselves in Syria.
Damascus Cover is based on a novel of the same name that came out in 1977. At the time, Syria was at the center of world geopolitical maneuvers while serving as the Soviet pseudo-proxy state involved in the Lebanese Civil War, in which Israel and, later, the US, were also heavily involved. Of course, Syria is again a focus of international attention today. But the film is not set now, nor is it set in 1977. This ruins many of the plot points of the novel, where Ari and Kim have genuine reasons to be in Damascus. Why set the film in Damascus at all? Obviously, it was not filmed there—they chose Morocco as a stand-in. While ordinarily such decisions would be the focus of a critical essay about a film, because of its substandard nature of the film such concerns are moot. People nearing the end of the Mumbai-to-New York leg of an aerial journey are not going to be asking these questions; they just want to be amused.
The movie is just amusing enough. The camera work is generally competent, minus one early fight scene that gets the post-Marvel-movie treatment, where for some reason filmmakers think US audiences want fights to be blurry blobs with smack and groan sounds. There are Nazis, always attention-grabbing to have, and for reasons that would make much more sense with a 1977 setting rather than a 1989 one, but they are still there. Rhys Meyers and Thirlby are classic “pretty faces,” Mossad is nearly as sexy as Nazis in grabbing viewer attention and the film features the final acting performance of the legendary John Hurt. So there are reasons to watch Damascus Cover, if trapped in an uncomfortable airline seat for far too long.
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