The Secret Agent (2025)

Rated R for old school violence, sex, nudity, and language.  The movie feels like it wanted to capture some of that late '70s exploitation, so the gore is really a lot. Like, I haven't seen gore like that outside of some of the more culty horror movies I've seen in the past. But this is also violence that, while not real, is meant to remind us that oppressive regimes tend to lean heavily into cold-blooded violence.  A body is just left behind on the side of a road and there's a shark that is autopsied.  It's a lot.

DIRECTOR: Kleber Mendonca Filho

I've been so productive today that it would be an absolute crime if I can't knock out my final blog of the day.  This is the last of my Best Picture noms for 2025 and Lord knows that I can pull this off as long as I don't get too distracted.  The real problem is that, like many movies in the international category about oppressive regimes, there's only so much that I understand enough to wax poetic about.

I'm talking about a certain subgenre.  The titles of these movies elude movie.  I know that they are in my Film Index and I can easily look them up.  I'm more inclined to put a link and hope that you do the heavy lifting.  That's an attitude of momentum and  I also am ashamed that I don't understand these movies as much as I should.  The Secret Agent is the best of these subgenres, but I can't deny that the film gave me too much of a headache trying to piece it together.  The biggest problem is a problem that I have with a lot of the Academy Award nominees.  In this specific case, The Secret Agent runs 2 hours and 40 minutes long.  There have been movies that feel like that amount of time can fly by.  And, as much as I liked how the movie was made, this is not one of those films.  This is "Eat apples to stay awake while watching it."  Yeah, I have a theory that apples keep me awake during movies while not being too unhealthy.  

You know that the director was messing with us, right?  It takes until the halfway point of the movie to tell us what the heck is going on with the film.  And even when he does, the motivation for everyone is still a bit cryptic.  You know from moment one that Armando is in trouble. But even his relationships are a little bit muddied.  Yeah, I figured that Dona Sabastina was helping him lay low.  But there is a lot of the movie where I didn't understand how these people knew each other.  Heck, I only knew that the police chief and his cronies were bad guys because they looked like bad guys.  But that even came into doubt when Armando and the chief are hanging out casually.  Is the point of the movie that Armando had the worst cover ever because he was hanging out with the people who were actively hunting him down?  Maybe the police chief had nothing to do with hunting down Armando.  I mean, it just seems like such a stretch of the imagination to think that these guys didn't know who looked like who?   Like, there are characters who are woefully undefined all for the sake of mystery.  The problem with that is that I have to understand what the stakes are inside of a movie to really get as much as I can out of it.  

The funny thing is that this more seems a send up of late '70s cinema than it does a story about corruption and hit squads.  Yeah, the film often feels grounded.  It's so grounded that the major critique of the film is that Armando kind of sucks at being off the radar.  He constantly responds to his name and calls his alias of Marcelo silly.  If this is a story about how the director really wanted to make a movie that took place in the late '70s in the context of the other great art that is coming out, I guess that works better.  I don't see "Best Picture" if that is the only reason that some of the imagery in the movie happens.  Like, from moment one, we get that Jaws plays a major role in the film.  For good reason, it ties into the image of the leg in the shark.  But that being said, I don't really get the direct connection between Armando and the shark.  I know that the corrupt cop is getting the leg back to cover up a murder that happened at Carnivale.  But ulimately, this isn't a story about the leg or the shark.  Sure, my favorite parts of the movie are the leg sequence and the shark stuff. But if we're about storytelling, the shark and the leg kind of muddy an already confusing story.  On top of that, while I adore the leg sequence, it is tonally confusing to have this really comic bit that the movie hasn't really earned.  The film is, decidedly, unfunny.  It doesn't try to be funny.  There aren't really bits in it.  While Armando is charming, that's a long way off from being a comic character.  The film is serious as a heart attack and still, we get this over the top bit about a severed leg kicking people and murdering them.

So what is the movie trying to say about cinema?  There's also a good deal of film dealing with The Omen, which is super cool.  Armando hides out with his father-in-law at the cinema.  But I can't help but think that the movie isn't just using the movie theater as a locale for a story.  The final shootout with the hitman kind of plays that up.  Because I don't want to dance around that sequence, I want to stress that the shootout looks like an old movie.  The guy gets shot in the eye and it looks like hamburger is coming out of it.  Another guy gets shot in the face and there's cheeky flap sloppin' around.  You don't see those kinds of effects in movies nowadays.  This is a send up of the action / horror movies of yesteryear.  There's even a reference to another movie from the '70s named The Secret Agent.  I mean, this isn't even a movie about a secret agent in the stricted sense.  This is a guy who has to stay hidden for the sake of his kid while an oligarch wants him dead.  

I did a play in college called "Mere Mortals."  It was a one-act by David Ives about three construction workers who all had theories that they were reincarnated legends, despite being average joes.  My professor asked me to put myself into it, so I made the whole vibe very comic-booky.  It worked because I was able to tie the notion of secret identities into the story that was being told. But, honestly, had I not been pushed into imbuing the film with my own tastes, it wouldn't have made a ton of sense.  That's kind of the read that I'm getting on The Secret Agent.  Yes, all the trappings of the film are great and made what otherwise would have been a kind of dull movie interesting.  But I also didn't really get why the old school film stuff was in the movie.  It doesn't matter that I liked it.  Everything should have a cohesive vibe and I felt like the style of the film and the story of the film were so disparate that I couldn't really understand why things worked the way that they did.

Because the film treated it as an afterthought, I guess this paragraph also comes across as an afterthought.  There's a narrative here about family and integrity.  Armando is in all of this trouble because he hit an oligarch's kid when he was being disrespectful to Armando's wife.  The wife is dead at the beginning of the story and we only see her through flashback.  It's assumed that the oligarch had her killed and was hunting down Armando and his kid.  The story tells us that Armando is doing everything for his son, Fernando.  And he tells us this a lot, but Armando and Fernando share very little screentime together.  Like, you can keep telling us that Armando cares about Fernando and I want to believe that. But in a 2 hour and 40 minute movie, we couldn't have had a couple more scenes with them together.  The movie pushes that we should love their relationship, going as far as having Wagner Moura play the adult verison of Fernando after playing Armando for the '70s sequence.  We are even told that Fernando doesn't really care about his father's life because he saw none of that.  But that moment would have hit so much harder had Armando spent more time trying to be with his son as opposed to working in a records office.  I guess the obsession that Armando had with finding proof about his mother's existence is a contrast to how Fernando feels.  It just doesn't really hit as hard as it should.

I always admit with these kind of movies that I might not be the target audience because I'm not savvy enough to understand a rich cultural dynamic that wasn't aimed at me.  Still, while I liked the look and feel of the movie, I don't think I ever understood the film enough to be properly invested.