Tony Gilroy, already a successful screenwriter who had scripted several
Taylor Hackford films such as
Dolores Claiborne (1995),
The Devil's Advocate (1997) and
Proof of Life (2000), as well as
Michael Bay's Armageddon (1998) and the
"Bourne" trilogy (starting with
Doug Liman's
The Bourne Identity in 2002), debuted as a director with
Michael Clayton (2007), a very effective thriller.
(Although the car bomb makes no sense: it's a murder, not an apparent suicide,
not a quiet way to eliminate a dangerous witness).
The film opens with the demented rambling of a man we don't see, later
introduced as Arthur, a top lawyer of a large law firm.
Then we see a female executive of the firm who is having an anxiety attack.
Then we see a man, Michael, who works for the law firm, playing cards for
money. He walks out in the middle of the night and a friend tells him to
drive urgently to a client. After that brief assignment, Michael drives
away. It's sunrise and he sees three horses. He stops the car and walk
towards the horses. Just then his car explodes.
The story now rewinds four days. Michael is separated from his wife and has a boy who is a fan of the book "Realm + Conquest". He is trying to sell a bar to
pay his gambling debts, but the auction will not yield enough money.
We see the female executive, Karen, rehearsing a speech for an interview.
At work Michael is assigned a delicate task: Arthur, a top lawyer, went crazy in
front of clients. Michael reaches Arthur and tries to calm him down. In the
middle of the night Arthur talks to Michael's son and is fascinated by the book,
"Realm + Conquest". The following morning Arthur disappears.
Michael is summoned by Karen. We learn that Karen's career depends on the
settlement of a
class action lawsuit
against an agricultural conglomerate, and Arthur is the one who architected
the defense strategy.
We see that Karen is aware of a secret memorandum prepared for the conglomerate
that would incriminate them. Searching through the contents of his briefcase,
the firm realizes that Arthur has been conducting some personal research about
the case.
We now see that some thugs are monitoring all phone calls to Arthur and following him.
And so they hear when Arthur calls Anna, a young woman who is one of the key
witnesses against the corporation.
Michael has to ask his boss Marty, the firm's managing partner, for money to pay his debt.
The boss tells him that Arthur has been calling Anna.
Michael finds Arthur and confronts him for running away. Arthur
implies that he feels guilty about all the rich clients he has defended over
the years.
Michael mentions that the firm knows that he has been talking to Anna and Arthur
is surprised because he asked Anna not to tell anyone.
We see that Arthur has in fact found proof that the corporation knowingly
poisoned hundreds of people: it's the memorandum that Karen too has seen, but
hidden. The people who are spying on him inform Karen, who orders them to kill
Arthur. They kill him and make it look like a suicide. The following day
Marty admits that the law firm is lucky that Arthur is dead, so he can't ruin
the settlement. Michael, curious, calls Anna and finds out that Arthur paid
her air ticket to come to New York from her rural town, and then never showed
up to pick her up at the airport. Michael visits her at the hotel where she is
staying and doesn't know that she too is being followed: Karen's thugs see
him. Anna tells him that she never spoke to anyone about her dealings with Arthur: how did the firm learn of it?
Michael becomes suspicious: why would Arthur kill
himself when he just paid for Anna to come and see him? Michael breaks into
Arthur's home and searches his notes. Someone calls the police that arrest
him for breaking in. Michael only has time to steal
the receipt from a photocopy shop that was inside the notebook.
Michael can't explain who would call the police since
noone else lives there. He is released thanks to his friends at the police
station.
Marty gives Michael a bonus implying that in return he has to stop nosing around.
Michael takes the check and pays his debt.
He then visits the photocopy shop and realizes that Arthur had paid for a
thousand copies of the secret memorandum that incriminates the corporation.
Karen's thugs are there and steal one copy to show Karen.
Now we are back to where the film started. Michael plays cards, then leaves
the gambling joint, then he gets the phone call to visit a client. But now
we also see that the thugs reported to Karen that Michael knows and we guess
that Karen has ordered to kill him too. We see the scenes of the beginning but
also the thugs inserting two bombs in Michael's car.
When Michael stops to admire the horses (which seem to replicate a scene from
"Realm & Conquest"), the thugs detonate the bombs. Everybody thinks that
he is dead. Now it's the big day when the settlement has to be signed and
it would be Karen's triumph. But Michael surprises her showing up alive and
asking her for a huge amount of money in exchange for his silence. She
agrees. Michael
reveals that he is wearing a wire and the police just heard her confession.
Michael walks away and the cops walk in to arrest Karen.
Duplicity (2009)
is a modest jigsaw puzzle of a spy thriller that simply shuffles the timeline
to make it a bit more interesting than the romantic comedy it would have been.
The film opens with a metaphorical scene in which two executives in suit
and tie, who just got off their respective private planes, fight a wrestling
match on the tarpan of the airport.
In Dubai a sexy Clare is approached by an aggressive and handsome Ray.
She lets him take her to his room but then drugs him and steals secret
documents.
Five years later they meet in New York. She pretends not to recognize him,
but he insists. Eventually she admits that she slept with him. They find out
that he is her field officer, which shocks her. She is clearly still a spy,
except that now she is into industrial espionage, and he is her contact.
The operation is run by a guy named Duke from the empty floor of a high-rise
building where he and his cohorts, including an older lady, have amassed
all sorts of high-tech equipment.
Their current customer is Dick, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (one of
the two executives seen wrestling on the tarpan). Dick is
desperate to find out what groundbreaking product his rival CEO is about to
announce. Clare is Duke's spy embedded in the rival CEO's company.
A flashback shows how Clare and Ray met again, accidentally, in Rome two
years earlier. They uttered the exact same lines when they met in Rome (which
means that in New York they were acting them, only pretending not to have
met since Dubai). They fell in love, slept together and dreamed of making lots
of money so they could quit their jobs.
Back to the present, Ray, who has just been hired by Duke, impresses his
boss by seducing the woman in charge of travels at Clare's company.
They obtain a wealth of information thanks to that scoop. Clare is called by
her boss at the company to investigate the dangerous break in security and
listens disturbed to the lonely travel department lady explain how she fell
for Ray's lies.
Another flashback shows how Ray and Clare met in London six months after Rome
and made further plans to find a way to live together, exscept that they did
not trust each other.
Back to the present Duke's team finds out that the new mysterious product
has been acquired from the startup of a kid who now lives a wealthy life
in the Bahamas.
Another flashback shows Ray and Clare in Florida a few months earlier: Ray
has a new plan to make money by spying and cheating on a company that makes
frozen pizzas. She is unimpressed because she has just taken a job in New
York working for Duke. That's the assignment she currently has: spying
on behalf of Dick.
Back to the present Clare is interviewed by the rival CEO (the boss of her
boss) about protecting the top-secret invention.
A final flashback shows Ray and Clare meeting when Clare found out that Duke
needs to hire a field officer, and suggests that Ray applies for the job to
become what will be her contact with Duke.
Back to the present Ray arranges a secret meeting at a bowling place between
CEO Dick and spy Clare in which Clare tells them what the invention is:
a product to grow hair, the cure for baldness. Now they need the formula,
which is worth a fortune.
Clare is summoned urgently at the company: they found an employee who was
trying to steal the formula. Clare is left in charge of the traitor and of
the formula for a few minutes. She takes the formula and calls Ray.
They frantically find a way to send the formula to Duke's office.
Mission accomplished. Except that Clare turns on Ray: they find a copy of
the formula on him. However, it's only for show. While Duke delivers the
formula to Dick (presumably a false one), Ray and Clare sell the real
formula to some Swiss customers of theirs. Dick calls a press conference to
announce with grand fanfare that his company developed a cure for baldness.
He will be embarrassed soon when his people find out that it's a fluke.
Ray and Clare are not any luckier: their formula too turns out to be worth
nothing. Back in New York the rival CEO is celebrating a successful
counter-espionage operation led by the older woman who pretends to work for
Duke: she engineered the whole story. Ray and Clare did not know that they
were being spied all the time by the rival CEO's men.
The Bourne Legacy (2012)
|
