A MOST WANTED MAN IS NOT WHAT YOU FIRST IMAGINE
To gain some credibility for the fiction film A Most Wanted Man, based on a 2008 spy novel by John Le Carré, credits at the beginning remind filmviewers that the 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, and then inform that Hamburg is a closely watched city for jihadists. When the film begins, a bearded young man, Issa Karpov (played by Grigoriy Dobrygin), enters the city illegally from the waters of the port, and camera surveillance immediately picks up his trail. Günther Bachmann (played by Philip Seymour Hoffmann), a rogue counterterrorist official of the German government, soon discovers that the Chechen Muslim is applying for political asylum with the aid of a German human rights attorney, Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), having been tortured while in Russia. On learning that Karpov does not want a large sum stored by his gangster father in a bank safe deposit bank and is eager to donate the sum to Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), an Islamic leader suspected contributing to terrorist causes, Bachmann plays a wait-and-see game despite the impatience of American officials who are soon apprised of the plot. There is plenty of suspense as the story unfolds to the inevitable conclusion, yet a humanitarian gesture to Karpov is calculated to bring praise to the German government. Nevertheless, Bachmann engages in more rough pursuit that seems necessary, and the role of the Americans is clearly vilified. Directed by John Corbijn, A Most Wanted Man is yet another post-9/11-oriented film that portrays government as abusing power under cover of taking measures supposedly necessary to root out terrorism. Germans, meanwhile, will feel superior to the doublecrossing Americans. MH