The irreversible irruption of streaming in our lives has brought under the arm, ultimately, one of lime and another of sand. The positive of the new consumption habits implies the access to huge catalogs that, in addition to serving as speaker to new filmmakers —who, under other conditions, would have very difficult access to the traditional industry—, is allowing the green light to be given to projects that, probably, would never have reached our retinas.
On the other side of the coin, there is the painful loss of what many refer to as “the cinematic experience”. Something that goes far beyond the collective ritual of projection and that translates into watching feature films conceived to be enjoyed in perfectly equipped cinemas in untreated rooms and on better or worse calibrated screens and a few inches of the most common of mortals .
This is precisely the biggest enemy of ‘The invisible agent’. Because the new from the Russo brothers, who landed as directors at Netflix after turning the Marvel universe upside down with ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and ‘Endgame’, serves us on a silver platter.to a spectacular action thriller loaded with stars —and the odd topic— whose technical and formal exhibition deserves much more than a limited theatrical release for a week.
Size Matters
You don’t have to be a student of the genre to see that ‘The invisible agent’ does not invent the wheel in terms of premise and plot it means. And it is that the adaptation of the novel by Mark Greaney, written in four hands by Joe Russo and Christopher Markus, is still a compendium of ideas and concepts seen a thousand times in homologous films such as those belonging to the sagas of ‘Bourne ‘, ‘007’ or ‘Mission Impossible’.
Agencies that operate in the shadows, relentless assassins, encrypted files that could put the institutions of a country in check… The list of commonplaces is not short and reduces the potential to impact, but they are incorporated into a tremendously fast narrative that sacrifices its spatio-temporal coherence to offer a gigantic dose of pure uncut fun in an international key.
However, ‘The invisible agent’ hides a couple of aces up his sleeve that allow him to look at his competitors face to face, the first of them being his assortment of characters. He pleasantly surprises the treatment of a few protagonists and antagonists that they breathe the charisma and the differentiating nuance that the film needed to overcome their clichés and that, in addition, balance the tone with a comic counterpoint that makes the whole look great.
If this mood shines at a great level on screen, it is thanks to the charisma of a cast tremendously inspired and focused on the self-conscious aspect that surrounds the story. This includes Ana de Armas —who continues to captivate as a heroine after her time in ‘No time to die’— Billy Bob Thornton, Regé-Jean Page, Ryan Gosling and, above all, an unleashed Chris Evans that he finds in his mustache your best weapon to steal the feature.
But none of this would matter in the slightest without an action that rises to the occasion and, luckily, the 200 million budget injected into production is perfectly reflected in some electrifying set-pieces that extract gold from the good hand of the Russo behind the cameras. In addition to the use of FPV drones that follows in the footsteps —albeit from afar— of what was seen in Michael Bay’s ‘Ambulance’, the taste for practicality and stunt real raises the film to a new level.
Unfortunately, and despite having an impeccable photograph of the expert in the field Stephen F. Windon —responsible for the last six installments of the ‘Fast & Furious’ saga—, I have ended up missing better fragmentation in the montage and, above all, a more explicit treatment of violence and according to the tonal bet and the forcefulness of some of its passages —the blood, as a general rule, is conspicuous by its absence—.
Ultimately, these are nothing more than small details that do not manage to overshadow one of the best Netflix Originals released to date. A actioner with the essence of the old school but molded based on contemporary aesthetic and narrative sensibilities whose nature unfairly condemns it to mass consumption on televisions and tablets.