The Foreigner (2017)

The Foreigner arrives in 2017 as a lean, cold-blooded revenge thriller from Martin Campbell, a director who has spent decades making this sort of thing look effortless. Jackie Chan plays Quan, a London restaurateur and former special forces operator from Vietnam, who loses his daughter to an IRA splinter bombing and proceeds to dismantle everyone responsible with homemade explosives and grim efficiency. The casting is notable: an Asian lead headlining a Western action picture, a rarity worth a nod. The film, however, takes the ethnicity from Stephen Leather's 1992 novel and leaves it there, treating Quan's immigrant background as texture for a vendetta instead of a subject in its own right. No character remarks on it. The camera does not linger on it. It simply is.

The political machinery around him involves a deputy First Minister, a British cabinet minister, a mistress doubling as a terrorist, and a wife who masterminds the whole campaign out of grief and grievance. Women occupy positions of real power here. The film has no interest in saying so. Gender is not a theme; it is a staffing decision. Nor does the conspiracy carry any economic argument. Terror and government intrigue drive the plot, not class resentment, not the climate, not anything resembling a thesis about how we should live. The violence is the point, and Campbell stages it with a coldness that borders on the surgical.

What the film offers is competence. Chan plays grief without vanity. Brosnan plays a compromised politician with visible relish. The screenplay never pauses to instruct the audience on terrorism, on immigration, on the moral obligations of empire. It is a genre picture that respects the genre, and that restraint is now unusual enough to register as a small virtue. We are left with a well-made thriller that asks nothing of our politics and very little of our conscience. In the current climate, that counts as a holiday.