Film Review | Argo

Had Ben Affleck not got his hands on Argo, another Hollywood player would have snapped it up in no time.

The mad piece of recent history – a detail from the 1979-80 Iranian Hostage Crisis – was published in 2007, and now stands as a towering example of fact being stranger than fiction.

If the premise is not enough to pique your interest, I don't know what will.

Broadly, it goes like this: when the American government refuses to hand over the recently deposed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – having been aided and abetted by the US government, he sought exile Stateside after being diagnosed with terminal cancer – a crowd of protesters storm the Iranian embassy in Tehran, taking six American employees hostage.

The tense political quandary leaves the CIA racking their brains: just how can a team of American agents quietly sneak in and out of Iran, six fellow countrymen in tow, when practically every Iranian and their mother is baying for US blood?

Enter CIA's 'master of disguise' Tony Mendez.

Here played by Ben Affleck - who also co-produces and directs – Mendez comes up with a plan so crazy that it might just work: pretend you're a fake Hollywood film production scouting on location in Iran (an over-the-top Star Wars knockoff,  no less).

After the agency reluctantly signs off on Mendez's desperate, screwball idea – "the best bad plan we've ever had" – he gets to work, with the aid of (real-life) Planet of the Apes make-up guru John Chambers (John Goodman) and (invented) co-producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin).

But there's no guarantees that the unprecedented plan will go off without a hitch. And it's only a matter of time until dissenting CIA bigwigs smell a disaster by their own hand.

Of course, knowing the outcome of the story robs it of what would have been some necessary tension, but Affleck has plenty to play around with before the film blazes through its inevitable climax, and he has proven his mettle as a director in recent years, salvaging a floundering acting career in the process too.

However, Argo's subtler and crazier tones, mixing comedy and tension against a fraught political landscape that remains relevant to this day, make for a project far more ambitious than Affleck's previous output: the superlative but thematically uncomplicated thrillers Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010).

It's a shame, then, that Affleck largely sticks to his standard palette: broadly sketching out his characters and setting up the thrills to arrive at the right time, while the sharp script by Chris Terrio (based on the 2007 Wired article by Joshuah Bearman) is largely left to take care of the comedy, with lovable old salts Goodman and Arkin getting the dialogue.

This creates something of a half-baked split (thrills in Iran, comedy in America), though Goodman and Arkin's lines are truly a joy to savour: "If it's got horses in it, it's a Western"; "You're worried about the Ayatollah? Try the Writer's Guild of America!"

The six hostages are made all the more human for being played by non-stars who happen to be solid actors: Clea DuVall and Scoot McNairy in particular bring out the pathos of being sitting ducks to a plan with no precedent and with little chance of success.

And that's the thing, really: Argo is a film made with superior ingredients.

But though the broth is nice and filling, it remains remarkably unremarkable.