2023-06-01 22:48:06
2018, the US Army has been fighting the Taliban (an organization recognized as a terrorist organization and banned in the Russian Federation) in Afghanistan for the second decade. Sergeant John Kinley’s squad (Jake Gyllenhaal – Donnie Darko, Source Code, Prince of Persia) urgently needs a new Afghan military translator to replace the old one they killed. He is recommended Ahmed (Dar Salim – Kvoto from the “Game of Thrones”) – a silent man with a dark past and a difficult reputation: wayward, smart, but he seems to know his business very well.
The opening credits reveal that over the 20 years of the military campaign, the US Army hired 50,000 local translators who were promised relocation to the United States for their cooperation. The final credit is that most of them were left to fend for themselves and many died at the hands of the Taliban. Apparently director Guy Ritchie (Locks, Stocks, Two Smoking Barrels) and his regular writers Ivan Atkinson and Marne Davies (who worked together on The Gentlemen, The Wrath of Men and Operation Fortune) conceived their film as a manifesto and mournful repentance.
The first about 50 minutes before us is a strong military drama. Trying his hand at a new genre, Richie holds himself like a diligent debutant: he acts carefully, wants to do everything right. Openly inspired by the classics – from “Apocalypse Now” to “The Hurt Locker” and “Marines” with the same Gyllenhaal. With a slightly bulging formalism, he selects for his story such intonations and expressions that usually melt the hearts of Oscar film academics.
From above, the camera shows the Afghan semi-desert (filmed, however, in Spain) to the meditative A Horse With No Name by America – yes, this is how a modern thoughtful film about war should begin. Searches at the checkpoint, searches of random houses in search of weapons caches. Interrogation of a potential informant on a night Afghan street at gunpoint and the bright light of car headlights. Richie does not make judgments and does not judge anyone. He then shows the everyday life of the Afghan campaign through the eyes of a detached and impartial observer. Then abruptly switches to the subjective view of a hand-held camera in action scenes. It peers intently into the impenetrable faces of John and Ahmed, as if trying to unravel these two, at first glance, dissimilar people.
Who are they? What makes them do what they do? Ahmed’s son was killed by the Taliban, but is that the only thing that drives him? He does not look like a fanatic obsessed with revenge – a too complex range of emotions seems to be behind his restrained facial expressions. Eloquently silent, may disobey orders. With sad irony, he looks at self-confident Yankees who imagine they know how everything works in this country.
And what makes John go on military missions for 12 years already? In Los Angeles, he has a loving wife, children, and a successful business that restores and sells vintage cars. Blame it on adrenaline addiction? Or, perhaps, a vague feeling of uselessness at home, which the hero hides even from himself? “In the desert, you won’t be able to remember your name,” the words of an old song sound off-screen, and, perhaps, the heroes stuck in this endlessly long war have simply forgotten who they were before a long time ago.
The advertising synopsis of the “Translator” for some reason without a trace retells its entire plot. If you do not know her in advance, the first half of the film looks like a tense action game with intrigue and unexpected twists, where it is not easy to guess who is a friend, who is a traitor, or who from the detachment next will get a bullet in the head. But closer to the middle, a key plot event occurs, and from that moment a completely different movie begins, in relation to which the previous action was just an expanded exposition.
The drama is replaced by a flat action movie. Realistic dialogues – forced oratorical performances. Richie briefly shows other events with a clip cut to the sentimental soundtrack of Christopher Benstead. The specifics are no longer important to him: he entered the smooth, well-trodden road of a simple plot idea, and from now on, everything that happens on the screen is just its schematic illustration.
The Taliban suddenly become stupid, and their decisions begin to obey not the requirements of logic and plausibility, but the desires of the scriptwriters. Their ability to fight is also sharply reduced – now they are extinguished in batches in noisy, but not so interesting skirmishes. All the subtext is washed out of the images of the main characters: yes, Ahmet really just takes revenge on his son, and John is just a brave warrior. And both of them are people of honor.
Shooting the first absolutely non-ironic film in his career, Richie does not seem to know how to replace irony, and unleashes tons of melodramatic pathos on the viewer, the quantity and especially the quality of which causes an unintentionally comic effect. When Gyllenhaal, lying in bed with his wife and staring into the void, delivers a grandiloquent monologue with theatrical lengthy pauses, ending with the words “No, I won’t be at peace now,” whatever you want, but it’s very funny.
If you close your eyes to the bad excesses with pathos, the second half of the “Translator” works well as a simple action movie, like the now-running “The Fugitive” with Gerard Butler (which Ritchie’s film even has a plot similar to). But the first half was too promising to be satisfied with such little consolation.
#Translator #Unusually #Guy #Ritchie