recommended

As Good As It Gets

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

This film couldn't decide what kind of movie it wanted to be: a serious spy film, a light comedy, a dark comedy, or a romance. The acting wasn't good. The screenplay was awful. The directing was abysmal. The idea could have worked: a mothballed CIA agent and his former-KGB girlfriend find themselves on opposite ends of a post-Cold War dispute, putting their relationship (and their lives) in jeopardy. But much of the plot line was completely unbelievable. Also the film was too choppy and inconsistent, almost schizophrenic at times. Just when you're starting to enjoy the farcical parts of the movie, BANG! The movie turns dark. I blame the director. It doesn't appear that he had any kind of overarching plan for this movie, seemingly taking each scene individually, and setting the film adrift as a result. About the only thing going for it was sex appeal, and even that grew tiresome. Take my advice: avoid this movie. There are better ways to spend 90 minutes.

"Spy Games" sets out to be like the old "I Spy" tv series with West vs East spying going on in exotic locations and lots of clever patter mixed in with a semiserious and intricate dramatic spy plot, a token babe here and there, etc. However, this unfortunate flick doesn't make it as it becomes convoluted and boring only managing to pull what's left of itself together in the end. "Spy Games" does have Pullman, Jacob, and Helsinki going for it but little else. Recommended only for the very bored.

The Cold War is over and two adversarial spies (Bill Pullman and Irene Jacob) fall in love and dream of living a normal life. There is trouble in paradise, however, since they find themselves on opposite sides of an attempt to pass satellite codes to the Russians encoded into a homemade porno film. This is a good premise for an international thriller, but the execution does a belly flop.This film was produced in Finland to very low filmmaking standards. Since I haven't seen many Finnish films, I can't say whether this is typical or atypical, but it was full of bad scene setups, plot inconsistencies and generally poor directing. The soundtrack was jazzy and nice, but it often didn't fit with the scenes to which it was applied.Director Ilkka Jarvi-Laturi was trying to present this as a lighthearted romantic comedy and international thriller, but it was marginal on the first count and a disaster on the second. Bill Pullman can carry off the lovable romantic hero role, but as a spy, he is a joke. Irene Jacob was better at handling the two aspects of the role, but the dialogue was so excruciating that her acting talent and beauty were not enough to save it.Jacob and Pullman had some chemistry in the romantic scenes, but both seemed flummoxed in the comedic espionage scenes. This was some incredibly bad writing and it must have been very difficult for these actors to say their lines without kecking.This film is a jumbled mess with terrible writing and amateurish direction. I rated it a 4/10. Be sure to miss it.

History is made at night has to be one of the worst films the Finnish film makers have touched in years. What a shame that director Ilkka Järvilaturi -who also made the terrible "Darkness in Tallinn"- has failed with a cast and crew like this: Irene Jacob and Kati Outinen, Kari Väänänen and Bill Pullman, Vesa-Matti Loiri and Bruno Kirby for example. Good performers' talents are wasted in a junk like this! Do your self a favor and don't watch this awful finnish try to make a romantic thriller that moves in time after cold war. This is not even unintentionally funny.Porn star Henry Saari has role in this. He plays a man in a porn video. Even this video is nicer to watch than the rest of this stupid, ridiculous...