‘When you are young, your potential is infinite…’
I’ve written before about how I struggle with Westerns, but occasionally, something will break through my wall of indifference and I will find some kind of common ground with the gunslingers and the lone cowboy. There is one genre however, that I feel I will never get on with. I just… I just hate spy movies. The whole concept of James Bond I find to be completely naff, and I honestly can’t remember sitting through an espionage flick that I have enjoyed. I also find the directorial work of George Clooney to be a mixed bag. I thoroughly enjoyed Ides of March, but The Monuments Men is barely watchable. So, what would possess me to watch a nearly two hour spy film with Clooney behind the camera? Well… just take a look at the cast. Wowsers.
Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell) is an incredibly successful game show host and producer who is approached by the CIA to become a hitman – or at least that’s how he tells it in his cult autobiography from which this film took its name. Leaving behind a string of beautiful women in his wake (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore), Barris somehow combines his high octane celebrity persona with a series of outlandish murders, all at the behest of operative Jim Byrd (Clooney). While much of what Barris claims is almost certainly completely fictional, legendary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has a great time in imagining what that double life could have looked like.
So, we have Hollywood royalty in the director’s chair, we have one of the most celebrated writers of his generation penning the script, we have a generational talent in the leading role and we have a supporting cast that would be the envy of any filmmaker, and yet… and yet Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a good movie that never really threatens to become a great one. As ever in this genre, the plot is needlessly complicated, the running time is needlessly long and the dialogue is needlessly cliche. I imagine this is what people who don’t like Arnie movies think about Arnie movies. They’re all the same, tired old action movie tropes etc etc. I guess it all comes down to personal preference and despite having so much going for it, this is a film I will never watch or probably think about again.
Fans of the genre might find something to enjoy here, everyone else? Maybe don’t bother.