When the Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes walked away with the 2010 Oscar for best foreign film, it was tempting to think that it benefited from a split vote between Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, of which were works of more substantial mastery.
Still, the South American film was a dense and evocative thriller that set a police procedural in the context of the republic's "dirty war", and wove a love story through it all, making for a film that was, as much as anything else, about memory and the unattainability of reconciliation, whether personal or national.
You can see this American remake (which inexplicably drops a "the" so the title doesn't make much sense) struggling for a similar breadth of vision, but it never gets there. The script, by director Ray (who wrote The Hunger Games and Captain Phillips as well as classy arthouse pics Breach and Shattered Glass) uses the aftermath of 9/11 as a political backdrop, but it is more of a distraction and a plot contrivance than part of the film's world.
More fatally, it fails to bring the threads together at the end: both the central love story and the question of political corruption are left dangling in favour of an overwritten ending.
Ejiofor and Roberts play LA-based FBI agents Ray and Jess, attached to the office of newly appointed DA Claire (Kidman). Attending a murder scene, they're horrified to discover the victim is Jess' teen daughter, but their investigation is complicated by the fact that their prime suspect (Cole) is a valuable snitch in a counter-terrorism operation that is their bosses' pet project.
