This decidedly shonky, if at least relatively unpretentious, action film stars Aaron Eckhart, once very much the coming man who’s not had the career you would expect for someone with his looks and talent. Eckhart plays a hitman named Evan Shaw; clearly a bit of a dolt, Shaw thinks he works for a super-specialised unit within the CIA that dispatches him to assassinate bad guys by sending him coded messages in the classified ads in newspapers (very retro). Shaw never sees his boss, Kevin (Tim Roth, clearly not taking this seriously) although a flashback reveals they used to have dinner together once in a while. Still grieving his late wife, Monica (Marysia S Peres, also seen in flashbacks), Shaw devotes himself to his lonely, murderous work, passing through airports, picking up suitcases with high calibre rifles at lost property offices, killing folks and then unwinding in hotel bars before moving on to the next gig.
In one such bar, a young woman named Kacey (Abigail Breslin, the wee girl from Little Miss Sunshine, now all grownup) makes eye contact, but it turns out she’s not looking for a hook-up as Shaw thinks. She explains that she too is from a spy agency and has some shocking news: he is not working for the CIA, Kevin is dead, and whoever is leaving messages for him in the papers is using him to kill their enemies for their own reasons. At first, Shaw refuses to believe he’s the equivalent of the second world war Japanese soldier who was stranded on an island and didn’t surrender until 1974. But some cursory internet searches reveal she might be telling the truth, so Shaw and Kacey team up and head to Malta for answers – as well as to allow the film-makers a chance to avail themselves of the island’s honey-coloured locations.
Roel Reiné, whose credits include loads of D-list titles on which he’s done various jobs, not only directs here but also operates the camera and composes the music (the latter a series of anonymous, featureless drones and synthesised strings with drumbeats that barely complement the action). The fight sequences are lethargic and feature a lot of extras waiting patiently for their cue to fall over dead. The Maltese architecture remains as lovely as ever; the dialogue is, however, shockingly bad.
• Classified is on digital platforms from 28 October.
