The Secret Agent

Grade: C

My Fandango ticket for The Secret Agent had the wrong runtime. At the moment, the app lists it as an hour and 26 minutes. It’s actually 2:41 – almost twice the advertised amount. 75 minutes in, barely anything had happened, when it comes to drama, stakes, and levels. I wondered how they could possibly wrap this up in 10 minutes. The second half (the part I didn’t know was coming) isn’t much better. Some of it gets interesting by the end, but it’s too little, later than I thought.

I’m glad I was misled about the length, because I didn’t know how much time was supposed to be left, and hearing 2:41 right off the bat would have been intimidating. The plot involves Marcelo (Wagner Moura). He is a technology expert on the run from Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1977. He is returning to his hometown of Recife, in hopes of reuniting with his young son and fleeing the country. I could go on, but reading a paragraph like this would bore me to tears already. This might be something they would show in a history class one day, which makes me glad I’m not in school anymore. It’s the kind of tedious historical drama that makes me feel like I’m broken, or at the very least, have bad ADD. As Roger Ebert would say: to the degree that I do understand it, I don’t care.

Most of the movie plays like there are expository scenes missing. Either I felt like I walked in late and missed some backstory/context, or it all came off as such a non-event, which had me wondering why what we were seeing was relevant to anything. I’ll get to Moura in a minute, but I really enjoyed two other performances as well: Isadora Ruppert and Laura Lufési – as, respectively, characters named Daniela and Flávia. I shouldn’t say exactly how they fit into everything. We meet them late in the film.

The third and final act has a subplot taking over, becoming the main focus. Several critics and viewers found this last piece to be a distraction, and preferred what came before, but it was the other way around for me. It’s the storyline I liked the best, and I imagined how much better it would have played had it taken priority all along. I didn’t understand the awards buzz for Moura until we got to this segment. He is very good, here in particular. I didn’t know it was him for most of the last scene.

You get used to reading subtitles. I found it intriguing that even though none of it was in English, I formed false memories of hearing lines I remembered in my language – though I know that’s impossible. I felt the same way when watching No Other Choice. A potential romance angle gets teased, but it’s not beaten into our heads, so I didn’t hate it. I didn’t hate The Secret Agent, but I did find much of it boring, mechanical, and rote – only to come to life at the end, but not enough to save it.

Grade: C