The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

Engulfed in a mountain of action movie clichés and conventional setups, V for Vendetta’s James McTeigue latest entry into the genre misses the mark – badly.

The story is centred on Kate Abbott (Jovovich); a highly regarded Foreign-Service Officer who has just been assigned to work in the US Embassy in London, with a job to screen all visa applicants trying to gain entry to the United States for suspected terrorists. On the lookout for anything suspicious, Kate’s attention is soon turned to Emil Balan (Rees); a shady-looking Romanian medical professional who claims to want to visit the US in order to attend a medical conference.

Sharing concerns with her immediate superior, Bill Talbot (Forster), Kate is surprised to see her suspicions dismissed and as she begins digging into Balan on her own, she soon finds herself running the unwanted attention from the Embassy and other government officials. Pushed out of her job, Kate – who manages to get out of a restaurant bomb blast almost completely unharmed – is soon framed for the murder of her colleagues and as she makes a run for it, a deadly assassin called, The Watchmaker (Brosnan) is called in to track her down and silence her for good.

Filled with unintentional humour and implausible idea after implausible idea, Survivor is a film that builds on a post 9/11 backdrop – the end-credits are drawn up to inform the audience on how many attacks have been foiled by the U.S government ever since – but, never reaches a fitting level of gravitas. 

Jovovich makes for an intriguing lead, though one of the biggest inconsistencies in the film is the fact that her character never seems as capable as the film insists she is – in layman’s terms, she seems much more naive than someone of her back-story should be. The situations that the character finds herself in completely undermine her billing as a competent and intelligent officer.

Meanwhile, Brosnan – sporting a hilariously-thin moustache disguise at one point – is a little hard to swallow as a villainous assassin, but he harnesses his versatile charm to good effect and is, at the very least, watchable.

Despite the presence of an impressive cast and a couple of slick action moments, McTeigue’s Survivor ­has very little to ride on; succumbing to action-genre-conformism, the film almost takes itself too seriously in a genre that works best when it doesn’t belittle the intelligence of its audience.