Ben Affleck's 'Argo' is A Crackerjack Political Thriller!

Rating: 9/10 (23 December 2015)

The old adage 'Truth is stranger than fiction' has its teeth properly sharpened in Ben Affleck's brilliant thriller Argo, a blend of political history and Hollywood hijinks that goes right for the jugular.
The film begins by spiriting us back to the American hostage crisis in Iran. It's November 1979, and a mob is howling outside the gates of the American Embassy in Tehran. When they break through and storm the building, 52 Americans are taken hostage, but amid the chaos six manage to escape and find refuge in the house of the Canadian ambassador. Ten weeks later, with the Iranian intelligence services closing in on the fugitives, the CIA are still floating desperate schemes to rescue them. Enter 'exfiltration' specialist Tony Mendez (a fabulously understated Affleck), who concocts a desperate, yet ingenious scheme of his own while watching a Planet of the Apes on TV. The six stowaways will get out of Iran posing as a Canadian film crew on a location scout. All they need is a film to pretend to be scouting for. They know it's a bad idea but "it is the best bad idea" they have got.
This is where Mendez's inventive genius comes in. To keep the numbers in his favor, Mendez sets up a phony production company and enlists two showbiz old-timers (a delightfully crotchety producer Alan Arkin and a charming make-up artist John Goodman) to get the fake movie (a terrible Star Wars knock-off called Argo) noticed by the media. If Mendez doesn't already have enough on his plate, there are multiple passports to be forged, and a lot of fast talking to be done. One minor slip-up, and everyone dies - including himself.
The many whirring pieces of the plot click into gorgeous synchronicity as the escape begins, with the CIA keeping the operation running back home, the house-guests swallowing their fear, and Mendez at the center of it all keeping a cool head and an implacable stare. Ben Affleck does such a spectacular job of establishing the many dangers in Tehran, from hot-headed guards at the airport to the maid at the ambassador's house under pressure to sell out the house-guests that every step of the escape feels like a minefield, the tension ratcheted up deliciously. The acting of the ensemble cast - led strongly by Affleck, - is faultless.
It is no small compliment to hail Argo as one heck of an efficient movie machine. The product it churns out - packed not only with gripping drama, but surprising bursts of humor amidst the tension and the danger - just cannot fail to impress. It leaves the daring to the plot itself and allows the crackerjack precision of the story to be what blows you away.
Ben Affleck's dynamite film Argo isn't just a tense, impeccably acted thriller, but is the kind of serious drama that leaves you smiling because of how marvelously well it pulls everything off.