Silent Partner (2005)

This movie is outright horrible. The first thing that caught my attention was the cinematography. It is haphazard at best. Settings in the film are too light or too dark, with a seemingly unending array of angles and shots to film each and every scene. This continues throughout the movie. All the non-stop changing of angles makes the film physically hard to watch. Although at times this does seem to take away that B-Movie feel. But then the rest of the movie happens and quickly reminds you it's a B-Movie, through and through.One scene shows Tara Reid's character looking in disarray. The camera panned away, turned, changed angles about 20 times in just a couple of seconds. This leaves one dizzy and begging for mercy. It is as though someone thought to direct an entire film the exact cinematography as the "Shower Scene" in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, except in this case the only person getting hurt is you the viewer. Possibly from vertigo, no pun intended.The dialogue & music actually does hold some parts of the movie together, no matter how horrible the dialogue or music gets. But by far the most annoying feature of this is doesn't make up for the fact every line is spoken in Russian was clearly an overdub, including almost ALL of Tara Reid's few lines. The use of dubbing in post is as obvious as in a 70's Martial Arts Action film from Japan and China in the 70s. Their lips just do not match the words. That applies to most scenes in this movie, ESPECIALLY Tara Reid's lines, which are few and far between. Overall the movie is hard to follow, not because of its convoluted plot but because of the literally impossible to follow camera movements. This film is not even worth watching, not even for laughs.

While it's not in the same class as "Gorky Park" (1983), fans of that film will find many of the same story elements, locations, and production design in "Silent Partner" (2005). It is yet another story of greedy corruption in the post-Communist Soviet Union and like "Gorky Park" it is professionally made with an expensive look and feel.With a 96-minute running length "Silent Partner" is one of the few films that would not benefit from a little trimming. In fact, by the end you suspect that there has already been considerable trimming; and that the price for keeping all the expensively staged action sequences is the loss of so much narrative material and character development sequences that the story borders on incomprehensible.It might be useful to keep pen and paper handy during your initial viewing, carefully tracking the assorted physically indistinguishable characters that enter and leave the film without explanation or background details, and then reappear in later sequences. But even this would not enable anyone to adequately sort through the confusion, because it is like tracking a bunch of identical size ants milling around an anthill.Apparently all this is not in the service of making the story a mental challenge for the viewer. At the end you are supposed to sort through the Hitchcock MacGuffin's and think how cleverly they fooled you. But all they really did was keep you in a state of dazed ignorance because you were not told enough about the motivations and the basic premise to have anticipated much of anything. This means almost every development in the story is its own little "deux ex machina" moment; "a plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new character, ability, or object".In a nutshell, CIA intelligence analyst Gordon Patrick (Nick Moran) is sent to Moscow to investigate of the suicide of Russia's Minister of Finance, Mikhail Garin. The suicide occurred just before the renewal of a massive loan program between the two countries, which has been placed on hold pending Patrick's review of the incident. You learn that the relatively inexperienced agent was chosen by high-level Russian and American interests because he is expected to simply rubber stamp the results of the Soviet's own investigation.But just prior to his death, Garin entrusted his unsavory daughter Dina (Tara Reid) with a brief case of secrets, which she is trying to turn over to Patrick.The main problem is that while the crew is good at setting up great shots and staging decent action scenes, the writer/director James D. Deck and the editor are pretty much clueless about how to tell a comprehensible story, build suspense, or make dramatic revelations.For example, midway into the film Patrick and Dina are being hunted by a nefarious group of agents and/or police (or maybe mercenaries, or maybe police who are moonlighting as mercenaries, or maybe some who are and some are not, or maybe…???), it is never really explained. Gordon wants to come out of the cold and he phones home to set up a meeting at a local restaurant. Things go badly and there is blazing shootout with all sorts of good guys and bad guys banging away at each other with machine guns and running around like a bunch of scalded chimps. No sooner is one guy shot than somebody entirely new to the story pops up from somewhere to continue the fight. Although you can't really tell the bad people from the good people, the real problem for a viewer is that it is impossible to gauge the progress of the confrontation, the director has not bothered to provide even the most basic information about the extent of each side's immediate tactical resources.Deck needs to be told by his producers that while confusion has its place in a movie, substituting it for suspense is not a good idea.Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

The story isn't very strong. Don't expect a "Bourne identity" kind of movie. It started of strong, Tara speaking Russian and it even sounded credible. (Not that I'm the Russian language expert.) Moscow had that darkish depressing look what gave this movie potential, I still believed in it. To bad it only took about half an hour to see they really missed the spot with this one. Acting was poor, maybe because the story itself was not very strong. There is this part in the movie where Gordon Patrick (Nick Moran) is having a conversation on the phone with the C.I.A., like you're listening to a Chinese synchronizer. W.T.F!? Too bad, the writer didn't even take little effort to give the main characters depth. Also, bit of a cheap and easy ending.Plus point is almost every scene where Tara Reid is in. Not that she's acting that well, in fact, she doesn't. But she really looks great in this movie. Overall, it was a bit of a disappointment. Rental material….maybe.

Gordon Patrick, young analyst of the CIA, should investigate the mysterious death of an important Russian politician. Soon it does friendship with Dina, an intelligent youth with a secret past.And she carries directly to a dangerous point without return, in which the more he advances more dangerous he returns : crime organized, political murders and the murky financing of a campaign, they are only the tip of the iceberg.Finally , Gordon should be faced to a brutal reality: those in which has trusted they are in which should never have believedThe whole thing at the above is a snack worth for a weekend