If you’ve seen the trailer for The Double you’ve essentially seen the film. Outside of filling in some gaps of story, and being substantially longer than the two minute trailer, The Double gives you nearly the entire film in two minutes. It’s a shame because in two minutes it’s significantly more effective than the film 98 minute running time.
The film centers around a legendary Soviet assassin named “Cassius” who was allegedly tracked down and killed by CIA operative Paul Shepherdson (Richard Gere). When bodies start popping up that bear the trademark of the assassin, Shepherdson is brought out of retirement by his old boss (Martin Sheen) and teamed up with a rookie FBI agent (Topher Grace) who coincidentally wrote his master’s thesis on Shepherdson’s takedown of Cassius. Together the two try to crack the mystery behind Cassius’s emergence, along the way running into a Russian killer (Steven Moyer of True Blood fame).
The problem with the film is that if you go into the film without having seen the trailer the film’s big twist comes out early and influences the entire film within the film’s first hour. For a film that’s trying to work a slow burn aspect to the big reveal, like a good spy thriller does, it’s way too early when Cassius’s true identity is revealed. If you’ve seen the trailer it gets all the more frustrating because the film doesn’t do much after the reveal; in the trailer it’s meant to be another part of a bigger story when in fact the big reveal actually is most of the plot.
It’s a downside to a film that feels like a fairly generic spy thriller. Considering the pedigree of Michael Brandt, who wrote the remake of 3:10 to Yuma with co-writer Derek Haas, one imagines that the two would have shaken off the stink of having been the writers behind films like 2 Fast 2 Furious and Catch that Kid to springboard to better work. Wanted was a step in the right direction, as was Yuma, but Double feels like a step back to the days of writing dialogue for Paul Walker and Tyrese Gibson.
The Double has everything else right a spy thriller ought to in terms of pace and tone; it’s actually a competent genre film from that perspective. The problem is a story-telling one that can’t get overlooked; either you’re waiting for the big reveal or the Law of Economy of Characters is going to make the big reveal easy to spot. Either way it’s an avoidable film.
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