DAMASCUS COVER : SILLY SYRIAN SPY YARN

Syria-ously?

As muddled and murky as the milieu of espionage, DAMASCUS COVER suffers from a distinct lack of pace, tension and action with a bloated run time that digests the story like a Galapagos iguana rather than a Syrian gazelle.

Based on a 1977 novel by Howard Kaplan, DAMASCUS COVER has been time travelled to 1989 by screenwriter Samantha Newton, whose dialogue and scenario skills are someone between latent and leaden.

We are introduced to Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Mossad agent in a clunky exposition voice over, always a tell tale sign of lazy dramatic writing which should show rather than tell, then see him through a botched extraction, only to have him psychoanalysed and sent back into the field.

He’s suffering post traumatic stress disorder due to the fact that he left his loaded gun unattended and his young son playfully shot himself dead with it. Just the man to send to Syria and extract their top double agent.

More Doube O enema, devoid of wit or double entendre, the producers try to attach a skerrick of Bond by dressing their spy in suits as he galavants from Germany to Israel to Syria.

The love interest offered by Olivia Thirlby has all the chemistry of a broken beaker no test tube baby could survive.

On the casting Richter scale of stereotypes it rates a predictable score with Jurgen Prochnow and Wolf Kahler wheeled out as Third Reich veterans and second tier villains.

John Hurt, to whom the film is dedicated, pops up as a Mossad chief.

DAMASCUS COVER releases July 25 on DVD through Defiant.