The Mark

Rating: Null/10 (10 June 2005)

Scriptwriters pay attention! For a movie to work, it needs to have layers. For a summer action movie to sell tickets it has to be totally without complexity. What to do?
Liman can hardly be called a filmmaker in this context, one in which so many chiefs are involved. But he has understood how to engineer layers and he might have led the charge, or perhaps been chosen by some savvy producer because he knew what he was doing.
In any case, the layers here are three, but they are in tones of reality rather than in story lines, overlapping motives, time slices, or so-called plot "twists."
You have the layer of reality that only two people inhabit. That's a world unto itself. Then you have a background world of comings and goings, of hits and threats, of nefarious motivations and all. This is derived from the old world of noir.
The noir influence is that people don't matter. People die, innocents die, the world plays with fate for its own amusement. The inadequacy of the story supports this: the two work for two independent agencies so it makes sense that each of them (neither one of which is an official agency) would want them dead if "exposed." But it hardly makes sense that the CIA (that's the CIA building in the beginning) wants to arrange to have them exposed. It only makes sense if it is a noir world, the world of "The Big Clock."
There's a third layer on top, a setup of chairs in a marriage counselor's office. This "world" annotates the one that the two inhabit as assassins, and that sits above the background noir world.
Each of these has a different cinematography, literally a different lens. Each has a different art design, a different approach to costumes and most importantly a different approach to acting. The office has the two acting to us, building a bridge to the audience; the second has them acting to each other, with the effect of apparent sexual chemistry. The third acting style is the Bruckheimer/Harlan interaction-by-destruction stuff.
Each of these affects the other to some amazingly small degree, even to the point of ambiguity about what happens at the end. Do they die in a Butch and Sundance manner and we see a "Taxi Driver" afterdeath memory? No, all is deliberately vague, past vagueness into nonsense.
Because that notion of different sense allows the script to have layers without us working at it.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.