Two stories are told in Most Wanted, and it’s plain to see that writer-director Daniel Roby cannot choose which to prioritize. The screenplay is based on the true stories of Alain Olivier, a heroin addict who was mistaken for a drug lord and sentenced to 100 years in a Thai prison, and Victor Malarek, a Canadian journalist who sought out the answers and discovered a heap of corruption underneath the law enforcement response. It gets even stranger once one digs into the details, but Roby is focused on a broader, procedural treatment of the material, dropping us directly into the story, which takes place in 1989, without a proper entry point. That might be because the film’s subjects are just barely characters.
We have hardly even met the film’s version of Olivier, named Daniel Léger (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), before we enter the scariest part of his story. Connected by an old friend, Daniel meets with Picker (Jim Gaffigan), a fisherman who moonlights as both a high-level drug dealer and offers his services—for an exorbitant fee, of course—as a criminal informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP is represented here by two grizzled, world-weary detectives (Stephen McHattie and Mark Camacho) and, later, a new hire (Cory Lipman) just out of the academy. This part of the story is told in flashback, and the hints we receive of its outcome are ominous: It led to Daniel’s capture and the death of an officer.
A few months later, in the more prominent half of the story that acts as a framing device, we have Victor (Josh Hartnett), an investigative reporter for The Globe and Mail whose editor (J.C. MacKenzie) is exasperated by the writer’s lengthy prep time and low returns. When Daniel’s case, previously reported but badly mangled, falls into Victor’s hands, his boss gives him the opportunity to travel to Bangkok for two days as a last-ditch measure to save his job in a dwindling economy for journos. Leaving his wife (Amanda Crew, trying her best in a thankless role) and newborn child at home, Victor travels to Thailand, where multiple attempts to access Daniel are stopped short by the local government.
Obviously, there is a lot of potential for gripping tension here – an indictment, perhaps, of the “war on drugs” being waged by Canada’s southern neighbor and its soon-to-be-elected president. Roby is more interested in building a general kind of tension, failing to take advantage of the promise of this story or the potential of the subject matter. Part of that might be its sluggish pacing and flat visual language, which submerge everything in a pervasive dourness only mitigated by the screen presence of Gaffigan. A primarily comic performer, the actor takes an unpredictable figure and runs with the chance to twist his persona. As Picker becomes more clownish, he also becomes more dangerous.
Pilon is also quite good at communicating the balance of desperation and resignation in Daniel, but these are the only two performances skilled at such communication. Elsewhere, Hartnett and McHattie simply ham it up without offering a precise vision of what makes their characters tick, although the two-dimensional writing doesn’t help matters, either. Roby is in investigative mode himself, but even as he remembers four of the Five Ws of journalism—the “who,” “when,” “where,” and “what”—the filmmaker neglects the fifth one. In an outward kind of way, Roby is a skilled technician of events and editing. The whole of Most Wanted, though, is dependent upon our understanding of “why.” We never get it.
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