The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski, 2010, 128m

A ghost writer is commissioned (for a quarter of a million) to write the autobiography of former British prime minister Lang. Another person hired for the same work was killed in dubious circumstances.The plot meanders drearily through possible war crimes committed on the orders of Lang at the bidding of his CIA masters with some glimpses of the lives of the high and mighty.

The tailor dummy PM is a feeble caricature of Blair. This political thriller is conspicuously deficient in thrills and and the politics too is obscurely infantile. It succeeds neither in being a James Bond movie nor in it's attempt to soar above the genre. One can only conclude that Polanski has ceased to tick. Everything is deja vu here. The only image that remains with me is the final one, with the pages of the manuscript scattering in the wind.

It's a ghost of a movie. A headache is acceptable as a means but not as an end in itself.