About as interesting as watching pasta boil

Rating: 3/10 (19 February 2013)

Creating suspense when a movie's outcome is pre-ordained is a high art. "Lincoln" (2012) did it. "Flight 93" did it. "Apollo 13" did it. "Flags of Our Fathers" did it. What they shared in common what great characterization. "Argo," on the other hand, is almost solely about the narrative. What little characterization in the script is extremely pedestrian, and none of the hostage actors (except for Tate Donovan) has the chops to infuse it with credibility and empathy.
The casting problem extends to Affleck himself. Always a piece of wood on camera, he again simply speaks his lines rather than embodies them (the scene where the CIA scuttles plan A excepted). Plus, since the movie went to great pains in the credits to show how physically similar the actors were to their real-life counterparts, why didn't Affleck get a portly, curly-haired Latino (Luiz Guzman comes to mind) to play Tony Mendez? The movie could have been more interesting if the story line had followed the actual events of the embassy workers being shuttled from the UK embassy to the Canadian embassy and receiving help from the New Zealand and Denmark embassy staffs. Then, I could have forgiven the hokey and completely fictitious climax. As it was, though, I nodded off a few times prior to the airport scene and simply didn't care at that point whether the hostages pulled off their caper.
Like the pasta boiling, this movie needed some zesty sauce to be more than limp and bland.