Implementing a gimmick with which to frame the narrative of one’s story is never necessarily a bad thing. The challenge, of course, is to justify the reason for that gimmick, and a further challenge, if one believes this to be a separate goal, is to make a good movie in the process. Writer/director Jonathan Ogilvie certainly has a gimmick in mind as the backdrop of an espionage thriller with Lone Wolf, a superficially ambitious but utterly empty thriller that throws a lot at the audience to see what ideas will stick. The concept is intriguing – following a group of unassuming activists who are meeting, in secret, to disrupt the G20 Summit – but the execution, as they say, is lacking.
Resting within the challenges that are already stacked up for any director is to give us a single character worth caring about. This is Ogilvie’s most significant failing, as his screenplay does not provide one sympathetic human on whom to hang this highly political narrative or the high-concept framing device. The subjects of the investigation are either crooks or victims, and the investigators are given such little screen time (all of which is devoted to exposition regarding the activists’ whereabouts or plans with regard to their capture and detention) that they might as well be cardboard cutouts in the background. Eventually, one’s patience simply runs thin at the sheer amount of information we are meant to remember.
We are first introduced to those investigators, led by Hugo Weaving’s Minister of Justice. He is not convinced that a handy new surveillance technique – which is basically “Big Brother,” if it were inflated to twice its normal, already considerable size – is all that useful in solving criminal cases. For one, it’s based on automated technology, which the assistant commissioner (Stephen Curry) and an officer (Diana Glenn) in charge of surveillance assure the minister is police protocol. For another, it’s ethically muddled, particularly without official clearance, but since its purpose is to tell a story of espionage that will lead to arrests, the good minister is fine with the method – as long as it produces results.
As for the subjects of interrogation, there are Winnie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), who receives word about a protest of the summit, by way of some amateur spy craft, and alerts her boyfriend Conrad (Josh McConville), who will handle all the connections and preparation. Winnie’s brother Stevie (Chris Bunton), who has Down syndrome, is sort of accidentally a part of this story, hosting his own video blog on YouTube until fate intervenes. Ossipon (Marlon Williams) and Michaelis (Lawrence Mooney) are among the operatives in on the plan.
Above their heads are the many cameras which, in addition to Stevie’s, tell the story we’re being told here, which weaves in and out of so many back-stabbings and twists and supposed revelations that it’s astonishing the movie doesn’t really fall apart until the halfway point. By then, we have become accustomed to the way Ogilvie is jerking us around the various movements of this story. Needless to say, the body count rises for the activists as the plan draws near, and the investigators begin to plot out how to arrest them, by whatever means necessary. Lone Wolf is a tired and formulaic thriller, bolstered only by a gimmick it has no idea how to use to its advantage.
Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures
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