Agents (2024)

Set in Mauritius, this is a really quite unimaginative action thriller that is largely ruined by some serious overacting by a baddie (who thinks he's Travis Fimmel) and by some fairly shameless heavy hints that their homeland is very much in the ambit of the Chinese. It's those latter folks that agree to exhibit a priceless jade on the island, and it's down to policeman "Shaw" (Nad Sham) to lead the team protecting it. It's here that the wheels start to come off the story. It's pitch black so they decide to take it through dense forest where, of course, they are ambushed and it gets pinched. Now disgraced, his boss is forced to allow "Yuan" (Naomi Willow) to help with the investigation to track it down. The remainder of this might have made for a passable detective yarn had it not been for the really bad acting, clunky writing and a tendency from the director to attempt to create pace and excitement by messing about with the speed of the film. The car chase looks like a commercial for Porsche and/or Mercedes Benz, the combat scenes are choreographed so as to make any decent attempt at continuity all but impossible - and that shows, and Willow's performance is just plain wooden. There's nothing remotely original to it and though only eighty minutes long, it proves to be a long struggle to understand why it's in a cinema at all. Some nice views of Mauritius but the rest of this is poor and derivative, sorry.