Fridae

A retired CIA agent resettles in Belgium as a security chief for a branch of a vast, international conglomerate. Not bad for a sinecure, you'd say. Unless he walks in to work one day and finds his office empty, his colleagues missing, his bank and social security records wiped, and clues that there's a hit list with his name on it. When will they come for him, when they come for him? And what exactly are they after anyway, and why?

This competent though paint-by-numbers conspiracy thriller would have you think these questions as the film unfolds. What I was thinking though was how often this story has been rehashed in paperbacks that get left in airport lounges and movies that you barely remember having even watched a year later.

Helmed by a foreign director and a leftfield cast (Eckhart isn't known for playing action heroes while you'd appreciate Kurylenko's stunt casting only if you're familiar with her work in video games), The Expatriate clearly wants you to marvel at how tightly written and competently made it is for a genre film, at how an international location change makes a standard, even derivative thriller look fresh and exciting.

What I was marvelling at though was how much The Expatriate started to play like Taken, especially after the film introduces an estranged daughter who is stuck with the retired CIA agent in Belgium and must learn to trust her formerly absent daddy while on the run from shadowy, conspiratorial forces. Better yet, I was marvelling at the fact that setting the film in uncharismatic, un-exotic Belgium with a cast of actors largely unconnected to this genre and playing to a script that's so pared down, it lacks the paranoid histrionics and heroic derring-do of a blockbuster thriller, The Expatriate actually outshines flashier counterparts in the same genre.