Momentum (2015)

Momentum is a 2015 action thriller in which Olga Kurylenko plays Alex Faraday, an infiltration specialist who botches a Cape Town bank job and inherits a flash drive, a team of assassins, and a government conspiracy. Stephen Campanelli, making his directorial debut after years as a camera operator, keeps the chases brisk and the plotting thin. The title promises forward motion. The film's theatrical run in the United Kingdom delivered roughly forty-six pounds from ten screens, which is a kind of momentum.

The cast is led by a woman and filled out with an international and South African ensemble, including Morgan Freeman as a senator and Hlomla Dandala among the pursuers. This diversity sits in the frame without announcement, which is how such things tend to work when nobody is making a point of them. Race is never raised. Cape Town supplies the skyline and nothing else. Where gender is concerned, the film extends a capable female protagonist and then undresses her at regular intervals: black lace in the hotel, a strip search, a revealing dress for the airport finale, torture staged around her exposure. Whatever empowerment the premise gestures toward, the camera has other business.

The political content amounts to a late reveal that a senator and his defense contractors stand to profit from a false-flag bombing. It is delivered once, briefly, and then abandoned for gunplay, which keeps the sermonizing at a minimum. A mild suspicion of the military-industrial complex is the film's only ideological furniture, and it is standard thriller stock. There is no environmental concern, no LGBTQ presence, no body-positivity project, no neurodivergent character, and no interest in rewriting history. Momentum is a generic genre exercise with a misleading name and a modest social conscience, most of it incidental.