MOVIE REVIEW

MOST WANTED

Rated R. Streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Google Play.

Grade: A

A true crime saga of yesteryear that remains eternally relevant, Most Wanted recounts a complex caper that spans nations and involves law enforcement, grifters, crusading journalists and a sap, a Canadian drug addict railroaded into a Thai prison for 100 years.

With echoes of Midnight Express, the drug smuggling classic of the 70s that put gullible Westerners in Third World nightmares, Most Wanted is far more sophisticated.

It doesnt romanticize its sweet but dim (very dim) junkie Daniel (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) and sees him, rightfully, as a pawn of just about everyone he meets.

Out of prison and homeless, Daniel is happy to find work on a yacht. Picker (Jim Gaffigan, just terrifically sleazy) is also a druggie, inveterate liar and supreme hustler who cons Canadian undercover cops into believing hes connected to Thailands international drug trade.

Sure, hes transparently, comically devious but not to the Canadian Security Intelligence Services undercover cops, led by Stephen McHatties Frank Cooper, who have no qualms giving him thousands of dollars for information and, crucially, a drug kingpin whom they can nail for importing kilos of Thai heroin.

Thats where dim Daniel is so useful.

Writer-director Daniel Roby has such a terrific eye for faces and an incisive way of photographing his large cast, that the story with its many facets could unfold silently, for these pictures really do tell the story.

Roby uses Gaffigans hairy bulk like a bulldozer that seethes and steams over every obstacle, whether its Cooper the cop whose pinched features suggest his bloods been sucked dry by Dracula or the very pale, frequently half-naked Daniel, who is continually seen as a figure ready to be lain on an altar and sacrificed.

This is a notorious if terribly familiar look at corrupt, lawless police, entrapment, intimidation. And a couple of good guys.

They are led by Toronto investigative journalist Victor Malarek (Josh Hartnett), who really did pursue a story no one cared about, even though it was an innocent Canadian citizen jailed for life and a patsy for a coverup by law enforcement.

Hartnett, strikingly tall, lean and fearless as Malarek, conveys the bitter realities of a diminished press with diminished resources.

This being 1989, the war on drugs meant headlines and lots and lots of money for drug buys and information. And virtually no progress with the war.

Pilon, a ringer for Caleb Landry Jones of The Outpost, almost makes us forgive Daniels frequent and continued stupidity. In reality, Daniel was Alain Olivier. As the films postscript makes clear, for the crooks and slimebags involved, justice was hardly served, mostly evaded.

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Most Wanted an arresting true crime tale of drug smugglers - Boston Herald