Courier X

I like long movies but this was ridiculously slow or just padded out with people walking very slowly and the leading actor was like a piece of wood with hardly any expression or personality The best actor was the mafia boss and he had it nailed Low budget movie that could of been brilliant but the money was spent on the extra 30 minutes of film which chewed into the small budget

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!

This movie makes a raft of sensational charges against the CIA, a statement which I don't think needs to be considered a spoiler, given the advertising line, "The movie the CIA didn't want you to see."

Both of the charges it levels against the Agency are now in the distant past, as far as the national news media are concerned, and are in the course of being forgotten altogether, say, like the civil war in Lebanon, which used to be headline news. These charges are definitely in the realm of conspiracy theory, since the Agency is depicted as consisting of a bunch of amoral killers who have no qualms about wiping out innocent people. They don't even grieve when their coworkers are assassinated.

Thus we have, thanks to the virtually one-man efforts of Thomas Gulamerian, an effort at popular history, a fictionalized dramatization of an episode in our history that may have happened the way it was shown here, and deserves to be remembered as part of the crimes the government commits against its own people.

The extraordinary control shown by the "courier" was a life-saving trait. The acting reflected that. The most gripping part of the movie were the claims made at the very end, where the characters are revealed as real people whose stories have been dramatized; if any of that is even close to true, this is indeed a sensational claim of malfeasance by our Deep State.

Alas, the reviewers want to groan that the Internet speeds are too fast for the 1990s, and the offices shown in the CIA building are too small and crowded.

I'm old enough to remember this stuff very well (MSNBC was about three days old when TWA 800 took place. The new network was suppoosed to combine NBC news withcutting edge MicroSoft technology. Full capacity was not up and running and Brian Williams had to hold up a Rand McNally Road Atlas to show where the crash occurred). My trophy wife is younger and didn't pay as much attention, so I had to spend a lot of time stopping to explain the Stasi, the drugs, the false (at the time) Alzheimers charge, etc. Nevertheless, I liked this film a lot. Of course I never believed the TWA 800 story from the start (Please note that Deputy FBI Director James Kallstrom is often charged with the coverup, but today is cited by some as a good guy, proving Comey's corruption). Some of the actors were sort of Ricky Nelson awkward, but some were quite good, especially Nathan. The sets were sub-par in many cases. But I agree wholeheartedly with the reviews who would choose these limitations over CGI and superpowers. I'm not taking the storyline as gospel, but it makes you think a bit. Two final thoughts: Did the CIA Director remind you of John Deutsch? Didn't you always suspect "the toothy thing?" (said that way to avoid spoiler alert. Good film, worth a watch any day.

This movie provides a view of the underbelly of our government in no shy terms. It is not for folks who need the pacing and eye-candy of a big Hollywood production. But it is very persuasive in and of itself. Very disillusioning to any idealistic American. But the subject-matter would not be served by a more polished presentation. It is a good demonstration of Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil". A very slow unfolding low boil thriller -- much more satisfying than the dramatizations of your run of the mill spy or espionage movie. Closely connected with actual historical event of recent American history. Close to a dramatic documentary. I did not have a problem with the actors. I can't imagine CIA and such sorts as being very histrionic. Again: The banality of evil.