Diamond smugglers, drug cartels, the CIA, each subject alone
garners immediate interest in most film-goers so throwing them all into a pot
and stirring must make for the most intriguing covert thriller ever made,
right? That certainly seems to have been the line of thinking from
writer/director Thomas Gulamerian. Courier-X,
which carries the riveting tagline “The film the CIA tried to stop”, deals with
a diamond smuggler who’s recruited by the CIA to help with a cover up before a
journalist, Gary Webb, blows the lid off of the Agency’s connection to the
Nicaraguan drug trade. Heading into deep conspiracy theory territory the film
also deals with the CIA’s connection to the explosion that brought down TWA
flight 800 in 1996.
That summary sells me on this film, it’s a damn good premise
that has the potential to be a classic espionage thriller…even if it begins to
tread into tinfoil hat territory. Unfortunately,
the idea is as far as the film gets. Clocking in at 2 hours and 12 minutes the
film seems about 40 minutes longer than it needs to be, with three or four
sub-plots that could have provided the extra film to be cut. The idea seems to
have been a slow burn but the end result, to be blunt, is just plain boring.
Sitting through the unnatural acting and odd choices in dialogue for payoffs
that never come. Confusion abounds as well, mostly due to the superfluous story-lines
and overflowing cup of characters. The film is sold on Udo Kier, one of his
generations most prolific character actors, but the true lead is Bron Boier who
plays diamond smuggler Trenlin Polenski. The character begins in an interesting
arc as it follows him from one end to another on a diamond smuggling run, as a
side note I had no idea how gastrointestinal the art of drug smuggling is…let’s
just say it begins with him stuffing a passport and cash into a lubed up condom
(you can guess the end result of that) and ends with him in his apartment
chugging a saline laxative while throwing a strainer in his toilet. Yeah, it
got real in the first 20. Sadly, the film proceeded through with the excitement
of a monotone lecture on the mating habits of grass hoppers. Boier, who may
have been playing the character as simply apathetic, just seemed uncharismatic and
not very interested in being there. The film itself was shot in a very strange
dichotomy beautiful scenic shots coupled with camera work which seemed more at
home in a show or film you’d find on Cinemax after Midnight.
Courier-X suffers
from a number of maladies but the root problem appears to be an unfocused
approach to a complicated storyline. Had the script narrowed to just one aspect
of the story, say the CIA/Cartel connection…perhaps making it the Gary Webb
story instead of focusing on the Polenski character, then we would have had
something worth seeing that could have really been something. I truly think this
story, however truthful or full of conjecture it may be, is more than worthy of
the cinematic treatment. Courier-X
however, misses the mark.
1.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
