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"Director: John Crowley; Screenwriter Steven Knight; Starring: Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall, Jim Broadbent, Riz Ahmed, Ciaran Hinds; Running time: 96 mins; Certificate: 15  With its timely focus on surveillance, privacy, terrorism laws and the question of how much classified information the public has a right to know, John Crowley&amp;#039;s Closed Circuit promises more interesting and provocative thrills than it can deliver. After a gripping opening sequence rooted in a near-universal contemporary fear \u00E2\u20AC\u201C a mosaic of CCTV screens reveal the buildup to a devastating explosion in London&amp;#039;s Borough Market \u00E2\u20AC\u201C the story rapidly unravels into hackneyed clich\u00C3\u00A9. After the sole surviving member of the terrorist cell responsible for the attack is arrested, his defense lawyer&amp;#039;s death in an apparent suicide leads po-faced recent divorcee Martin Rose (Eric Bana) to step in. The government&amp;#039;s evidence against the suspect is too sensitive to be revealed even to his lawyers, but Rebecca Hall&amp;#039;s steely attorney is appointed to act as a special advocate, to hear the evidence in closed court and argue for its disclosure if she sees fit.  If all this sounds clunky and overly convoluted in print, it&amp;#039;s no less so on the screen: adding would-be intrigue is Martin and Claudia&amp;#039;s romantic past, which in practice only emphasises just what a damp squib Bana&amp;#039;s character is. He sleepwalks through his scenes in a pompous monotone and strikes up no chemistry at all with Hall, who&amp;#039;s reliably strong and brings prickly intelligence to an underwritten role.   As a vast government conspiracy begins to emerge, the dialogue becomes cornier and cornier as characters speak in stilted declarative sentences, spelling out moral dilemmas rather than conversing like human beings. As Martin and Claudia separately become aware that they&amp;#039;re being watched, Crowley drops in a series of less-than-subtle surveillance images that would have felt dated years ago and squeezes cheap thrills from a cat-and-mouse plot that swiftly becomes silly.  There&amp;#039;s some cynical intrigue in the hypothetical realpolitik backdrop, embodied by Jim Broadbent&amp;#039;s subtly menacing Attorney General and Anne-Marie Duff&amp;#039;s chilly government lackey. Many of these scenarios \u00E2\u20AC\u201C whistleblowers being muzzled, witnesses dying under mysterious circumstances \u00E2\u20AC\u201C won&amp;#039;t feel like the stuff of paranoid fiction for anyone who&amp;#039;s glanced at a headline in the last decade, but they&amp;#039;re evoked without exploration, designed to give the film a superficial sheen of relevance that it substantially lacks. The occasional striking moment aside \u00E2\u20AC\u201C one key scene portrays a sobering hypothetical Ground Zero where Borough Market used to be \u00E2\u20AC\u201C Closed Circuit makes little impression. It&amp;#039;s too plodding to work as a paranoid thriller and too ham-fisted to work as anything deeper, while Bana&amp;#039;s blank slate performance is the last nail in the coffin.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/review/a525486/closed-circuit-review-eric-bana-stars-in-clunky-paranoid-thriller/>