Brazil’s The Secret Agent is the gripping thriller that never was, a meandering two-hours-and-40-minute that is in desperate need of a heavy edit—but scene-by-scene it is a well made depiction of slow descent into authoritarianism through the eyes of the people affected.
Wagner Moura stars as a dude who is fleeing back to his hometown with a fake identity to elude governmental actors and uncovers details about his dead mom. It takes a while for you to know this because writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t really care—he’s made the movie he wants to make, seemingly with no one whispering in his ear that story and forward momentum do actually help, especially when you’ve deceptively titled your movie “The Secret Agent” and the marketing team is selling it as a suspenseful thriller.
Things don’t get suspenseful until the third act, which means you have to sit through two hours of seeming nothingness to get there.
I’m a straight shooter when it comes to reviewing movies, so typically when a movie is three hours long and I describe much of its runtime as “nothingness” the next adjective I use is “boring.” But oddly, The Secret Agent isn’t boring. Thanks to Moura’s immersive performance and scenes that are well written and well executed (even if when pieced together they don’t do a whole lot), The Secret Agent has a subtle but alluring dance that is able to sweep you off your feet, if only by a centimeter.
When things finally click into place and bad things start to happen, The Secret Agent finds its footing. There is “payoff” to what you’ve had to sit through. The action starts before the action actually starts, even: a scene in which Filho flashes back to a dinner that goes sideways between Moura’s character and a government official is superbly done. The violence that ensues feels real, grounded, and like an action scene you’d get out of a taut thriller from the 1970s.
And then Filho stops abruptly, tries to do a No Country for Old Men ending, and jumps ahead to modern time for some absurd reason, killing all chances at a satisfying conclusion. Two hours and 40 minutes… for that!
Looking back on this half-day experience, The Secret Agent has a lot of strengths but the parts are greater than the whole. Filho attempts to do too much. A thriller without any sense of urgency or tension? An examination of Brazil’s authoritarian regime, when last year’s I’m Still Here did it better? A movie called The Secret Agent with no secret agents? This one isn’t worth the time investment.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.