Survivor (2015)

Survivor arrives in 2015 as a spy thriller assembled from familiar parts, and it conducts itself with the grim efficiency of a diplomatic pouch. Milla Jovovich plays Kate Abbott, a Diplomatic Security Service agent in London who survives a restaurant bombing and spends the rest of the running time proving she did not do it. She is competent, physical, and largely humorless, which is standard issue for the action heroine and not an argument about anything. Angela Bassett occupies the ambassador's chair with the authority the role requires. The visa team around them is notably multi-ethnic, and this is presented without a single line of commentary. The film simply casts well and moves on, which is its own quiet statement about how far such casting had traveled by the mid-2010s.

Pierce Brosnan, meanwhile, plays an assassin known as the Watchmaker, a man of many faces and few convictions. His client is a grieving scientist; his client's partner is a businessman named Pavlou who intends to short the market once Times Square goes up in flames. There is a flicker of eat-the-rich sentiment in that arrangement, a greedy man profiting from carnage, but the film treats it as a plot mechanism and never as an indictment. The antagonists are Islamic terrorists, which places the picture firmly outside any contemporary conversation about who gets to be the villain. Nothing here lectures. Nothing here preaches. The film wants to be a chase, and it is a chase.

The result is a competent, forgotten thriller that borrows from better ones and apologizes for none of it. Its social consciousness extends about as far as a well-populated casting sheet and a woman holding a gun. There is no romance to interrogate, no identity to unpack, no environment to save, no body to celebrate, no mind to explain. It is a film about a bomb and a clock, and it understands both. This critic found the experience roughly equivalent to a transatlantic flight: tolerable, unmemorable, and over before the beverage service concluded.