The Diplomat (2009)

The people who made this movie need to look up the word diplomatic immunity. The story is so full of plot holes that it makes Grand Canyon look small.The story starts out with the main character getting pulled over in custom (which is highly unlikely since he's a diplomat) Than after a few hours/days with interrogation he all of a sudden is whisked off to Australia for witness protection along with he's ex wife. From than on out its get confusing and I couldn't figure out if getting caught in custom had been the plan all a long, But what I gather was that he's involved in smuggling a nuclear bomb into Australia and he got the key that could set it off. The MI6 is involved or so it seems, I got the impression it was just two desk clerks who cooked up the idea with some wage confirmation from their superior, but that part never really get clear. It is too long and the storyline goes in too many different directions ,and it never really gets clear why he smuggled drugs in the first place. *************** Spoilers ***************spoiler *******************spoilers****** spoilers The Australian police in Sydney seem to make one mistake after another for no comprehensive reason. they gotta be the most incompetent cops I've ever seen They see the main character "steal" a phone from a nearby kid, they see him talk while he runaway from them, yet they don't question him about the phone call at all. Later as they are about to search a car dealership for the bomb, they fail to see a car that drives away just as they enter the perimeter, even tough it happens right in front of them. I also doubt the local police alone would be fit to handle a case like smuggling of a nuclear weapon, I think a higher authority would be brought inn quite early on.

When I watched Part I of this two-part series (sight unseen, no peeking at the newspaper blurb), my immediate reaction was that it HAD to be an international co-production, since it suffers from that curious and embarrassing mannerism of nearly all productions made jointly by two (or three) national broadcasters, namely a perceived need to show countless clichéd images of the countries and cities concerned, presumably so that the Aussies can see "what London looks like" and the Brits can see how nine kinds of wonderful Sydney is.Hence the action was punctuated every few seconds with expensive helicopter footage of locations like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the London Eye, the Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, the Gherkin, St. Paul's, Piccadilly Circus by night (have I left anyone out?) and we got no authentic sense of "place" at all, simply bleeding chunks of what some imagination-challenged advertising agency thinks tourists want to see, OUGHT to see. This approach actually seems a little pathetic and lacking in national self-confidence for a mini-series made in 2009 (and not a film from 1959), as though the show somehow still felt obliged to serve up eye-candy vignettes of the places to be at all "relevant". The British do not feel a similar need for these postcard shots when they are working alone and/or for a domestic audience, and I rather doubted the Australians would really be so gauche that they think their own grown-ups need to be treated to an open-top-bus sightseeing tour between snippets of violence or dialogue.Well... it turns out I was dead wrong about the co-production angle. It seems to be an OZ production plain and simple (and several people have mocked the wandering accents of the cast, too), sold on to UKTV, whose involvement was thus presumably only financial and not "artistic". I'm not sure what that says about the mindset of the makers (or perhaps after all they got seed-money from the NSW Tourism Development Office and other similar instances in the UK), but personally I found the tacky inserts immensely intrusive and annoying, and I couldn't help thinking that if they had spent less on them and more on the nuts & bolts of script and direction (and had even hired an actor with a smidgen of dramatic skills and no facial paralysis to play Ian Porter) they might instead have been able to create a thriller that held my attention.Still, they are definitely not the first to fall into this trap, and sure as hell they won't be the last. Unfortunately.

In America (aka Region 1), millions of yankees have been duped into renting this title under the impression that it is a 94-minute long MOVIE--not a tepid British TV miniseries styled after Jack Bauer's "24," without most of the budget, killing, or excitement. In fact, the climax of the 93-minute Part Two of THE DIPLOMAT (a more apt description of this story than the Brit TV title, FALSE WITNESS) shamelessly steals one of the season-ending scenes from "24." But would Americans shell out one red cent for THE DIPLOMAT if they knew in advance it was 187 minutes long, and chock full of title character Ian Porter's flashbacks about his only child's disastrous loss (and by "chock full," I mean literally EVERY FIVE MINUTES, with a really cheap sepia-toned, shaky camera technique reminiscent of director Ulli Lommel at his cheesiest!) While Dougray Scott as Porter tries to create what James Bond would be like if he was a pathetic, mostly clueless and totally graceless homely man with nothing to live for, all the other characters in THE DIPLOMAT are even stupider, incongruous caricatures. If you need three hours of only occasionally interesting tedium to prove forever that NOT EVERYTHING on Brit TV is Masterpiece Theater-quality, THE DIPLOMAT may be just the ticket for you. It shows how shrewd Alistair Cooke was in not being buried, since he has no grave to spin in!

I saw this at home on DVD, and only realized it was a TV mini-series after I checked the running time ( over 180 minutes! ). Anyway, I decided to see it in one shot, if bored I could always stop it or pause for more popcorn! I found the plot a bit of a mix of other stories' ideas, but it was well developed and ended up quite interesting. I happen to appreciate most British/Aussie movies, especially the espionage genre, where they have a way of keeping you always wondering on the next move, like a chess game. Details come and go very quickly and sometimes I was glad on having subtitles to better understand the accent...! Acting is very good as I expected from the selected cast. I guess I was tired after 3 hours, but I could hold for another half if needed!