Customer Reviews

Silent Partner

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While it's not in the same class as "Gorky Park" (1983), fans of that film will find many of the same story elements, locations, and production design in "Silent Partner" (2005). It is yet another story of greedy corruption in the post-Communist Soviet Union but like "Gorky Park" it is professionally made with an expensive look and feel.

With a 96-minute running length "Silent Partner" is one of the few films that would not benefit from a little trimming. In fact, by the end you suspect that there has already been considerable trimming; and that the price for keeping all the expensively staged action sequences is the loss of so much narrative material and character development sequences that the story borders on incomprehensible.

It might be useful to keep pen and paper handy during your initial viewing, carefully tracking the assorted physically indistinguishable characters that enter and leave the film without explanation or background details, and then reappear in later sequences. But even this would not enable anyone to adequately sort through the confusion, because it is like tracking a bunch of identical size ants milling around an anthill.

At the end you are supposed to sort through the Hitchcock MacGuffin's and think how cleverly they fooled you. But all they really did was keep you in a state of dazed ignorance because you were not told enough about the motivations and the basic premise to have anticipated much of anything. This means almost every development in the story is its own little "deux ex machina" moment; "a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object".

Apparently everything is in the service of making the story a mental challenge for the viewer. A premise that would help explain why the DVD does not have a closed-caption feature. They give you English subtitles when Russian is spoken but the viewer is left to catch a few words of heavily accented and mumbled English in the other scenes and interpolate that into meaningful sentences as best they can.

In a nutshell, CIA intelligence analyst Gordon Patrick (Nick Moran) is sent to Moscow to investigate of the suicide of Russia's Minister of Finance, Mikhail Garin. The suicide occurred just before the renewal of a massive loan program between the two countries, which has been placed on hold pending Patrick's review of the incident. You learn that the relatively inexperienced agent was chosen by high-level Russian and American interests because he is expected to simply rubber stamp the results of the Soviet's own investigation.

But just prior to his death, Garin entrusted his unsavory daughter Dina (Tara Reid) with a brief case of secrets, which she is trying to turn over to Patrick.

The main problem is that while the crew is good at setting up great shots and staging decent action scenes, the writer/director James D. Deck and the editor are pretty much clueless about how to tell a comprehensible story, build suspense, or make dramatic revelations.

For example, midway into the film Patrick and Dina are being hunted by a nefarious group of agents and/or police (or maybe mercenaries, or maybe police who are moonlighting as mercenaries, or maybe some who are and some are not, or maybe...???), it is never really explained. Gordon wants to come out of the cold and he phones home to set up a meeting at a local restaurant. Things go badly and there is a blazing shootout with all sorts of good guys and bad guys banging away at each other with machine guns and running around like a bunch of scalded chimps. No sooner is one guy shot than somebody entirely new to the story pops up from somewhere to continue the fight. Although you can't really tell the bad people from the good people, the real problem for a viewer is that it is impossible to gauge the progress of the confrontation, the director has not bothered to provide even the most basic information about the extent of each side's immediate tactical resources.

Deck needs to be told by his producers that while confusion has its place in a movie, completely substituting it for suspense is not a good idea.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

First the positives, the movies is set in Russia and appears to have been filmed there or at least in eastern Europe. Even if they filmed it this way to save money, the producers deserve some credit for authenticity. The secondary "Russian" characters also seem authentic ( except Tara Reid ) and are decent actors.

Thats pretty much it for the positives. The two or three main "actors" are pretty poor. The lead character is a CIA analyst who the agency sends to the field to conduct an investigation in to a Russian Billionairs death. "Why would they send a desk officer in the field?" you may ask, well you dont have to because the movie asks this for you 30 or 40 times. Because they wanted him to fail! < gasp!>,

They do fail. Fail in making an egaging, believable, or entertaining film. Im not sure but I think the bulk of Tara Reid's part was dubbed. badly. The main character cant act. The plot goes beyond cliche to routine and boring. Car chases, villians with facial scars, crooked politicians, and a hooker with a heart of gold. And no you dont see Tara Reid naked in it either.

Its one of those movies that you watch and constantly ask "why is he doing that?"

Too bad this isn't a remake of the '70's Elliott Gould thriller. Tara's head sawed off into a fish-bowl might be worth seeing.