One key moment in The Moderator reveals director Zhor Fassi-Fihri’s film to be a morally reprehensible one, and the rest of the production only manages to highlight how cheaply produced and incompetently written it often is. The film is without value or merit. The setup is the familiar stuff of a revenge thriller, following a stoic and capable vigilante exercising her particular set of skills and idea of justice upon those who have done wrong. In this case, a woman, unnamed at the beginning, wakes up in an anonymous hotel room to discover the horrific news of the murders of some friends who went hiking on the outskirts of Morocco and were killed in an attack by ISIL. Curiously, the film skips over the section of time in which the woman, eventually called “Mya Snik” (Irma Lake), turns from regular person to trained assassin, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Separately within the screenplay (written by Hicham Hajji and Jonathan McConnell), our villain is a truly nasty piece of work – a sadistic sexual predator who openly abuses his employer-employee relationship with his head of social media to set up “private parties” and find unwilling victims. The key and revealing moment obviously involves Vance (Michael Patrick Lane) managing to wheedle one of two women invited to his latest party into his room. There, as indicated, he sexually assaults her in a scene that lasts five minutes and serves no purpose that the suggestion of his nature wouldn’t have accomplished. Even worse, though, is that the film puts the onus of blame onto the woman, who had opined just minutes before that she wouldn’t mind being assaulted in such a manner by someone so handsome.
Indeed, the film makes a spectacle of Vance’s acts of sexually predatorial behavior, all while certain characters in the periphery of this story state, almost directly to the screen, statistics involving the sexual assault of women by men. In other words, the film wants it both ways, for reasons that are essentially incomprehensible. When the film is not depicting women as helpless victims, Fassi-Fihri seems entirely uninterested in the hand-to-hand combat that results from Mya’s astonishingly deadly murder mission (including one mass-poisoning event offscreen mentioned by Gary Dourdan’s weary lead detective Bourdeau). That, though, might stem from the obviously diminishing craft on display.
Dialogue often seems awkwardly dubbed, and every actor forced to deliver the howlers written for them (not one bit of it seeming to have been written for humans to speak) seems more than a little confused. We don’t blame them, since even the mechanics of the plot rely on a rickety foundation of story or even character logic. Twists arrive out of nowhere, such as how overly zealous the filmmakers’ trust in our investment is to include a plot thread involving Vance’s social media manager Hakim (Don Bigg), and land with a thud, either because we don’t care or because they were plainly telegraphed to begin with. Action sequences are flatly staged, pedestrian in their visual language, and haphazardly edited.
The Moderator must eventually tie together the different threads – the activities of Mya and Vance, as well as an international investigation that eventually throws in one final twist for good measure – but it cannot even do that without just climaxing in a huge, bloody fistfight. From the first frame to the last, this is a lost cause.
Photo courtesy of Saban Films
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