I have written here before about the mystery of great films with great stars that go directly to home video. Many a great film does not find the range of audience it deserves because of this injustice. Richard Gere has had it happen to him before with a great little serial killer film called The Flock with Claire Danes. It was a tightly written, very disturbing film that unfortunately nobody saw. His latest release, The Double, has seen the same fate and been sent directly to the retail shelf. Did it deserve to though?
When a senator is found murdered, the CIA calls in retired agent Paul Shepherdson to take on the case. The method of the senator’s murder indicates that he may have been killed by a rogue Russian assassin who was thought to have been killed by Shepherdson in the 80s. A newbie FBI agent named Ben Geary (Topher Grace) wrote a paper on the assassin known as Cassius and is paired with Shepherdson to try and catch the elusive killer. But Shepherdson seems to have many secrets in his past and Geary seems to have an unnatural obsession with not only Cassius but with Shepherdson himself. The question is whether this highly unusual pair can catch the mysterious Cassius before he kills again.
The premise of The Double really intrigued me. I love double agent stuff and I usually really dig Richard Gere. But from the first 15 minutes or so of The Double, I knew I might be in trouble. The script was all over the place, not making much cohesive sense. I was doubly concerned when Topher Grace showed up. Grace is just horribly miscast here. I always liked him on That 70s Show but have not really seen anything of any value since. He was promising in Soderbergh’s Traffic and I actually liked him quite a bit in In Good Company with Dennis Quaid. But since then all his movies seem to miss the mark. In The Double he is just terrible. It literally seems like Eric Foreman from That 70s Show moved out and got a job with the FBI. It just didn’t work. The structure of the story was badly set up as well with a major plot twist happening very early in the film that should have been saved for the third act, flashbacks that serve no purpose and a drawn out conclusion that just wasn’t necessary. I won’t ruin the plot twist here but if you watch the trailer, it actually reveals it there oddly enough. The Double had promise but failed on pretty much every level. And that was very surprising considering it was made by the writers of Wanted and 3:10 to Yuma, two films I enjoyed immensely.
The Blu-ray from VVS is very nice. The image is crystal clear, solid colors, fantastic detail and very filmic. For a lower budget film it was a pleasant surprise. A beautiful Blu-ray transfer for a mediocre spy thriller with a terrible Topher Grace performance is what it all adds up to. If you can get past the Grace element, there might be something to enjoy here, but there were just too many negatives for me.
