I can't say how accurately director John Boorman recreates Panama, never having been there, but he certainly brings to life a vibrant, realistic world, reveling in the sleaze and sweat. The movie has a wicked, ribald sense of humor -- witness the scene where Brosnan and Rush discuss business in a skanky hotel room with porn playing on the TV, a clear view of a hooker servicing a client across the courtyard, and the bed wildly vibrating; or the scene where Brosnan gleefully leads Rush into a gay bar to talk business and ends up dancing cheek to cheek with him.
Some of the film's tactics don't work too well, in particular Harold Pinter's role as Pendel's dead Uncle Benny, who pops up from time to time, Jiminy Cricket-like, to warn Pendel about lying. Boorman tries every now and then to jump-cut to brief flashes of flashback or flash-forward, which sometimes work and sometimes don't. One scene, where Brosnan and Catherine McCormack, as a British Embassy employee he's lusting after, dance in a bar intercut with flashing scenes of their subsequent love-making seemed like a carbon copy of the scene in Out of Sight where George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez drink in a bar intercut with flashing scenes of their subsequent love-making.
Brosnan is dashing, nasty fun as the rogue spy, Andy Osnard, and Rush mostly tones down his arm-waving emoting to play the timid tailor. Brendan Gleeson (who knows Boorman from The General) is not terribly effective as the sloppy, boozy rebel leader, Mickie Abraxas -- what exactly was the point of hiring an Irish actor to play a Panamanian? The marvelous Dylan Baker has an all-too-brief appearance as an American general who delivers a hilarious little speech of moist-eyed patriotism, tearing up at the memory of pulling his troops out of the Canal Zone when it was given back to Panama, and calling to mind George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove. David Hayman is also very funny as Osnard's boss, a self-important little Scot.
The movie needs a little more of the Dr. Strangelove touch -- it tries for cynical absurdism but can't sustain it. Still, it's enjoyable enough, thanks mostly to Brosnan's devilish performance, although the understated ending leaves things a little too flat. I, however, will leave you with some of Uncle Benny's words of wisdom, which I rather liked: "Sincerity -- that's a virtue. Truth -- that's an affliction."
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