with cloak-and-dagger suspense, betrayal and backstabbing, political conspiring, shyster-mobster and intertwined human relationship all woven and fabricated together, allowing you to know some truth and facts behind Iran-Contra scandal during Reagon administration.
The movie could be much much better, if 1) The script could be more condensed, the tempo from scene to scene, setting to setting, locality to locality much much faster, 2) with more production budget, 3) a better director, 4) more appropriate casting 5) better post-production editing.
But in real world, this film just turned out to be snail-crawling slow, loosely relayed sequence, and boring acting. A film produced in 2016 couldn't even catch up the tensed paces like what we saw in "Three Days of the Condor (1975)". Lot of scenes showed the shortage of limited budget. The CIA headquarters just looked like some small company's office, only with several key characters, all worked in tight small offices, the CIA director's office got a staircase that made his office looked very funny. The journalist's scenes, simply looked primitive and unrealistic...There are lot of segments that should be paced 300% faster, yet simply turned to be like the speed of the locomotive when we pioneered from the east to the west coast.
There's only one thing that I have to point out: The dialog sometimes quite strong and top-notched with depth and cynicism, but due to the loose script, the mediocre directing and extremely low budget, making this film looked more like adapted from John Le-Carre's deadbeat boring espionage novels. A 2016 movie's tempo is 1000 times slower than a 1975 one, an absolutely shame!
