Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston
Directed by Ben Affleck
With his acting career locked in a nosedive in 2007, Ben Affleck ignored the publics sniggering, stepped behind the camera, and delivered Gone Baby Gone, a gritty, enthralling Dennis Lehane adaptation. After maintaining a holding pattern with The Town, Affleck takes a significant step forward with the based on a true story Argo, revealing that hes now capable of transforming a by-the-numbers screenplay into superior entertainment.
With anti-American sentiment festering during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, protestors storm the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Affleck stages the chaos expertly, escalating the mayhem until six employees are forced to take shelter in the Canadian ambassadors home. Cut to Washington, where CIA agents Tony Mendez (Affleck) and Jack ODonnell (Bryan Cranston) act on the best bad idea they have: Mendez will pose as a Canadian producer looking to make a Star Wars knock-off in Iran. Hell then pass the diplomats off as his crew and walk them right through airport security.
While Mendezs trip to Los Angeles to meet with an unscrupulous producer (Alan Arkin) and makeup wiz (John Goodman) allows for some obvious-yet-effective jabs at Hollywood, the extended sequence relaxes the stranglehold the film has on its audience. Consequently, theres significant dramatic ground to make up once Mendez touches down in Tehran. Fortunately, Affleck rarely takes his foot off the accelerator in the final hour. Frenzied camerawork and frantic pacing conspire to send us careening to an unspeakably tense climax. And in those final moments, we completely forget that this storys resolution has already been recorded in the history books. Indeed, seven lives seem to be hanging in the balance and were left hanging on tenterhooks.
