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Monday, November 18, 2019

Beirut (2018)

This is a rare thing in a spy movie.  It is smartly written, gritty, with a smattering of corruption underlying what you might presume to be an action movie.
John Hamm plays Mason, a career diplomat.  The movie opens at a party at his house, where a friend and colleague of Mason’s named Cal comes to him and gives him terrible news—their 13-year-old ward Karim is the younger brother of a known terrorist, the man responsible for orchestrating the Munich Olympics attack. As Mason is trying to negotiate a peaceful way to extricate Karim safely, Karim’s brother’s people show up and everything goes to hell. Karim is taken; Mason's wife is shot and killed.
Mason leaves the CIA, becomes a raging alcoholic, working labor disputes in Boston.  He is contacted 10 years after leaving Lebannon and told that he’s needed in Beirut. If the city was on the verge of chaos in 1972, it is a ruinous nightmare in the early ‘80s, torn at the seams by everyone in the area who seeks to control it, including both the PLO and the Israelis. Against this backdrop of crisis, Mason is informed that Cal has been kidnapped, and now-grown Karim is the man responsible.Rosamund Pike is his handler, and together they unravel what is really going on.  The tensions and alliances of the time are well laid out and the movie is a good one.

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