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Finding something new to watch on Netflix can be incredibly hit or miss. I’ve mentioned before that I think Netflix’s marketing leaves something to be desired. While the “above the fold” promotional spot on Netflix is highly important to them and clearly drives a lot of viewing to shows or films that get that position, it can be something of a crap shoot beyond that. Particularly once you move beyond the ‘obvious’ stuff that has more significant marketing and PR.

A case in point is Close a new British (ish) film that appeared on the service with basically zero fanfare a few days ago. I spotted it in the Trending section. There was a picture of Noomi Rapace, the actress best known for being in the original Lisbeth Salander in the The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo and its sequels.

At a shade over 90 minutes, it suited me for the time of the day. The trailer seemed to promise action, and another good actress, Indira Varma was in the cast too.

I settled in to watch.

Make no bones about it. Close is a poor film. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s a truly awful film, but it reminds me of the kind of film that you occasionally got suckered into watching when they had gone straight to DVD.

The film opens with Rapace looking after two quivering journalists when they’re under attack somewhere in the desert by an ISIS-type group. She shoots the bad guys dead, steals one of their trucks, and gets the journalists to safety.

Meanwhile in Britain, a very rich daughter is sulkily attending her father’s funeral. Her stepmother is ready to take control of the family’s mining business. With that business itself in competition to take over a lucrative African mining operation. The business TV news is full of nothing but this riveting news.

However, when the will is read, it turns out that the daughter and not the stepmother will be getting all her father’s shares in the business. They don’t get on, and the stepmother heads to Morocco where their family business is based.

For reasons that I don’t really understand, an entirely separate ‘close’ (hence the film’s title) security detail is to look after the daughter, and they need a woman, since the last bloke ended up shagging her and having to leave in disgrace.

Step forward a reluctant Rapace. She has to accompany the daughter to the secure compound in Morocco where she will be safe. For completely unclear reasons, she’s travelling separately to her mother. But she gets a helicopter ride for the last leg of the journey, so that’s OK.

But what do you know? On the first night, there’s an attack on the premises and it’s only due to our heroic close protection officer that the daughter escapes with her life.

The rest of the film is broadly a series of chase scenes, interspersed with moodiness and fight scenes. And none of this is done very well.

The first sign that this film is going to be a bit rubbish is the expositional funeral oration. Whoever is leading the service seems to think that nobody in the church has the first idea of who’s died, so he explains it all to us. It’s lazy writing.

There are long pauses at times. Like someone in the editing booth was checking their Instagram feed rather than deciding which frames needed to be cut. Rapace’s character is clearly supposed to be monosyllabic, but it’s just boring and moodiness only gets you so far. She has her demons of course, but it’s just dull. Early on, when they’re being hunted by the police, she finds time to just stand on a rooftop having a fag and taking in the view.

The criminals are all cartoons, and they’re not very good at their job, even if that’s just supposed to be inflicting violence. At one point one of them has the upper hand in a fight, even though a knife is sticking out of his leg. Does he just put two bullets in the desperate close protection officer he has trapped on the floor? No. He spends more time standing over her needlessly until she knees him in the groin and turns the fight around.

The action sequences are badly directed too. Fight choreography isn’t simple, and telegraphing to the audience what’s going on isn’t easy. Early on, someone gets shot, and it takes a couple of unnecessary other camera angles until the shooter is revealed.

Moments of tension are missed. With the two women suspected of murdering a Moroccan policeman, finding somewhere to hide and staying hidden should be tenser than it ends up. Of course they get found in the end but there’s no build up despite the opportunity being there to ratchet things up.

Most laughable are the scenes involving Indira Varma’s business obsessed mother, and the takeover as reported on the fictional business TV channel. Hilariously, at one point there’s a shot of people in a Moroccan bar watching this English language channel, rather than say, sport or even local news. I know, I know. In reality you can’t move for North African bars that show CNBC all the time!

At another point, Varma’s character has given an interview, in the studio, with the channel. Amazingly, she has been happy to do this, with her rival bidder in the same studio at the same time. I mean, I’m sure that the channel would love to have the two rivals alongside each other arguing, but it’s unclear why any PR would let their CEO walk into such a trap. I don’t know where the channel is supposed to be based, but you can only assume that it must be somewhere in Morocco since travel times don’t really come into play, and all the characters are in Morocco.

You may also imagine that there might be regulatory issues about giving live interviews during a corporate takeovers. I mean, it could affect share prices for starters. Apparently not.

What’s even more entertaining is that it turns out that the interview was pre-recorded. So we watch Varma’s character sitting with her board watching the interview back when it’s played out. Except, she must know that it didn’t go well. Then she turns off the TV in disgust when she sees that it did in fact not go well… which she already knew.

At another point Rapace’s character and a villain have a fight and tumble into what looks like the hold of a fishing boat. We quickly discover that the hold is full of water. You might think that this would cause the boat to either sink or be in a sunken state at the harbour side. A flooded hold has no impact on this particular boat.

An underwater fight takes place. The water is crystal clear, which to be fair, isn’t a problem unique to this film, but there’s a shoal of quite large fish swimming around the massive hold. That turns out to be super useful since she effectively wins the underwater fight when her combatant gets totally confused and disorientated by all the fish that suddenly swarm around him. This disorientation goes on for quite a long time. None of it makes any sense.

In another scene towards the end of the film, Rapace’s character and the daughter have locked themselves in a safe-room and are trying to regain control of something. They have to guess a password. The daughter eventually works out that it’s her birthday – which it always is in such cases. A few moments later, the daughter has burst out to protect her stepmother (er, spoiler alert?!), despite having no combat training. She leaves her elite combat trained close protection officer in the room, and allows the door to be slammed behind her. Rapace’s character is locked in! She needs the password to release the door. That’d be the password that she saw the daughter type on the screen ten seconds earlier; the password that at this point even I, a disinterested viewer, can remember. But rather than recall the number we saw in massive letters on the screen a few seconds earlier (a somewhat obvious lapse in this security software), she has to wrack her brain to recall the birth-date from the file she has previously memorised.

The thing with this film is that it seems like there was some money behind it. While most of the film was shot in Morocco, it doesn’t look super-cheap. It’s just that the script, editing and direction are all off.

This isn’t the worst film I’ve ever seen, but it is 90 minutes I’ll never get back, although I confess that by the end, I was fast-forwarding a bit because frankly it was boring and didn’t deserve my time.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a good action film. I like a half-decent Liam Neeson film as much as the next person. Actors like Noomi Rapace and Indira Varma are good, but they can only work the material available. And in this instance it was poor.

The other day, Netflix got a Best Film nominations in the Oscars for Roma (Which I’ve not yet watched. Yes, I know I should have been watching that rather than wasting time on this rubbish!). And not every Netflix original film is going to be as good as every other one. But a few less direct-to-DVD titles, or clunkers that the studios offload on the platform (e.g. Cloverfield Paradox) might be a smart move for them.


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