What The Hell Did I Just Watch?
I go on an extended rant about the direct-to-Neflix thriller THE BRICKLAYER
There is much to report on my Kickstarters, and yet much of it is still in progress and I don’t want to jump the gun.
Besides, these past few days I can’t stop thinking this movie I saw on Netflix I cannot for the life of me make sense of.
I knew I probably wasn’t getting a cinematic masterpiece when I saw a movie I had never heard of before, The Bricklayer, but it starred two actors I’ve always enjoyed, Aaron Eckhart and Tim Blake Nelson, and sometimes these low budget thrillers wind up being taut little gems of economical filmmaking.
But this movie? I can’t even figure out what the people making this movie thought the story was. It’s about an ex-CIA agent who’s called back into service when one of his assets, Radek (played by Clifton Collins, Jr., another actor I usually like), goes rogue and starts killing foreign journalists critical of the CIA while leaving photos of various murders the CIA had Radek commit. And you know what? I’ve got to say, not a bad premise.
Radek’s former handler Aaron Eckhart and a young CIA analyst (played by Nina Dobrev) are sent to Greece by Tim Blake Nelson to stop Radek. (She’s by-the-book; he flouts the rules but gets results. Not the most original dynamic, but it’s a trope for a reason.)
Then I starting getting confused. First of, Tim Blake Nelson is worried there’s a mole in the CIA feeding Radek intelligence, but... why? All the evidence Radek leaves is for murders he committed while working for the CIA. Why would he need a mole to obtain photographic evidence of murders he did?
Okay okay, maybe Radek needed the mole to provide the paper trail connecting the CIA to the murders, but then later when Aaron Eckhart and his partner realize Tim Blake Nelson hasn’t told anyone else about their mission, which leads them to conclude Tim Blake Nelson is the mole, even though TBN already told Eckhart/Dobrev he was worried about the mole and thus keeping their mission secret.
SIDE NOTE: It’s also just a bit weird that we’re never supposed to question that we should be rooting for Eckhart/Dobrev to help cover up a bunch of murders that the CIA is definitely guilty of hiring Radek to do.
Anyway, it later turns out Tim Blake Nelson isn’t the mole. It’s Aaron Eckhart ex-girlfriend, who’s now station chief in Greece. How does Aaron figure this out? Well, Aaron had to leave Greece in a hurry, so he left his album collection with his ex-girlfriend. This album collection includes an album that we see in a flashback Radek gift to Aaron Eckhart. Aaron finds this same album among his collection, which somehow convinces him that his ex-girlfriend must be the mole, but why wouldn’t an album Eckhart received as a gift be part of his own album collection?
ANOTHER SIDE NOTE: Aaron Eckhart’s character loves Miles Davis. That and bricklaying are pretty much his only personality traits. So, what is this album that Radek gives to him -- the very, very important album that later “reveals” the whole twist of who the mole was?
Miles Davis, you say?
Nope, it’s some random country album, On the Rocks by Midland, a band that has no connection to Miles Davis, and which is not referenced or talked about anywhere else in the movie. Eckhart and Radek also treat this this album like some kind of rare collector’s item, despite the fact that it came out in 2017.
And then there’s all these weird continuity errors. Like in one scene Nina Dobrov is carrying around this sack of explosives, then suddenly Aaron Eckhart has the explosives and uses them to blow up the bad guys. Then in the climax, Aaron Eckhart spots Radek on top of some scaffolding posing as a news cameraman with a bunch of other cameraman, but when we cut back to Radek his news camera has suddenly changed into a sniper rifle, which you would think would at least freak out the other cameramen on the scaffolding.
So I’m inferring that this move changed a lot in the editing, leading me to wonder is there some cut of the film, or perhaps scenes they weren’t able to shoot, that would help the plot make sense.
And the weirdest thing is this was directed by Renny Harlin, a competent director. Die Hard 2 is not a bad sequel, and Deep Blue Sea is fun. What the hell happened?
So, did anyone else watch this movie? I am very eager too know what you thought, because I can shake the feeling I might have missed one or two key details that make the whole thing comprehensible.
If so, please let me know. I’d love to know what the plot of this film I just watched was.