Movie Movie Podcast

This is one of those middle eastern political thrillers about covert ops and stuff. I blame Hurricane Sandy for this being late.

Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel play the lead Army Rangers, James Caller and Jill Harper who are recruited to do special ops missions for the CIA.  Their handler, Cal Marshall played by Kyle Chandler recruited them because he used to be their unit commander back in the day.  Anyway, Cal puts together covert mission to extract a U.S. POW, Will Stilton, played by Bill Fichtner from indiscriminant Arab terrorist forces, as soon as he gets the intel as to where Will is.

They go into some curiously empty cave thingy where the terrorists are and they extract Will using deadly force.  They are ambushed however by the indiscriminant terrorists and are all three, forced to hole up in a local town restaurant until the coast is clear.  Cal goes to the head of the CIA covert ops division, David Wallace, played by Mark Strong, to ask him to send more soldiers into their area because he got a distress call.  David says he wont risk it.  The information about this mission has already spread to far. Cal angrily reports back to James and Jill that they will have to get Will out themselves.  Cal put the mission together without his authorization, so he wont put his name on it.

James and Jill are partners long enough we can tell that they’ve been in situations like this before and know how to handle it, but Will tells them this is different.  If he gets back to the US and reports back on the terrorist activity he found, he’ll be a target.  Long story short he tells them that (flashback scene) David sent him to Iraq months ago to gain intel on terrorist activity and Will was too good at his job and found out that David was paying Iraqui terrorists to commit crimes on US soil, so that our foreign defense policies would look weak, he could gain more authority and use that to leverage a presidential campaign.  If Will comes back alive he’ll be killed and discredited.  James and Jill say that’s not going to happen.  They have a plan.  They decide, the only way to get back to the US safely, is to be considered dead.  They discreetly contact Cal and tell them what they’re going to do and he says it’s a suicide mission.  James says “exactly”.  They decide that they are going to go back into the caves, and go back INTO the terrorist compound to get hard evidence on David, and be considered dead.

The next act is nothing but a bunch of hardcore terrorist killing action by James and Will, while Jill does hacker stuff to get into rooms that have photos of David shaking terrorist dudes hands and stuff.  They get the info but not before Will is shot in the neck and killed.  He tells them he’ll die a patriot if they get that evidence back to someone they trust at the CIA.  David catches on that Cal’s been speaking with James and Jill and attempts to paint those three as US terrorists and uses his new authority to do so.  However, by the time James and Jill get back to US soil and get the flashdrive of information to one of the CIA field agents who is waiting to arrest them, the jig is up.  The agent calls to have another agent arrest David for crimes against the US.  He shoots one of the agents and James and now freed Cal run after him as he goes to a roof to get a helicopter.  James and Cal corner him and right as David tries to shoot Cal, Jill from behind shoots him.

James and Jill clear Will’s name, Cal takes over the division and everyone wins.  Some useless stats about military stuff plays on screen.  The end.