DVD releases: Fair Game | Essential Killing

Fair Game

E1, 17.99

Essential Killing

Artificial Eye, 15.99

AS THE director of The Bourne Identity, Doug Liman did a lot to update the spy thriller by giving it some real-world resonance and offsetting the genre's James Bond-style cartoonishness with a real-world drabness.

In Fair Game, however, he's working from the opposite impulse: attempting to tell the somewhat mundane real-life human story of exposed CIA undercover agent Valarie Plame Wilson (played by Naomi Watts) within the framework of the espionage genre he helped reinvigorate. That he's only partially successful suggests that genre films can perhaps withstand a little reality check more than true stories can live up to the demands of blockbuster entertainment.

Still, in taking on the story of how Plame Wilson's cover was deliberately blown by the Bush administration after she and her diplomat husband (Sean Penn) raised doubts over the intelligence being used to back-up the government's claims about the existence of WMDs in Iraq, Liman is good at getting to the heart of the complex relationship that exists between a married couple working in a stressful field. Fascinating though their story is, it does get bogged down in self-righteousness, and in the end, is yet another film full of impotent rage about the intransigence of the Bush era.

A MORE unusual take on this period is provided in Essential Killing, even if the film is not the controversy magnet the casting of Vincent Gallo as a Taleban insurgent suggested it might be. That's probably a measure of veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's skill in evoking the realities of the "war on terror" and extraordinary rendition without resorting to inflammatory rhetoric.

Instead he crafts a stripped-down survival thriller and provides just enough information about its anonymous protagonist/antagonist to clue us in to his situation without dictating how to feel about him. Here Gallo does his best acting work in years. With no dialogue, he's forced to dig deep to give us a sense of a man instinctively doing everything he can to stay alive. Deafened by a blast in Afghanistan and tortured by his US captors, he's being "rendered" for further interrogation when he manages to escape, only to find himself on the run in a harsh Polish winter wilderness.

The film never provides definitive answers as to what's driving him, but that works in its favour suggesting that the atavistic desire to stay alive might be what makes us all human.