It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times, as Montgomery Burns via Charles Dickens once asked a monkey to type for him. That pretty much sums up the experience of watching Relay. At times I really thought I was watching one of the great films of the year…but then the monkeys got ahold of the script, and all hell breaks loose.
Through an opening exchange, Relay plants us in the world of “Tom” (Riz Ahmed). He’s a fixer for the whistleblowers, those people scared for their lives because they have something on a corporation with unlimited power and resources. His latest client is Sarah Grant (Lily James), a PhD scientist who stole documents about corporation Cybo Sementis Research Institutes’s buried effects of one of their products. From there, we get into the details of how Tom’s seemingly small scale operation is uniquely equipped to broker negotiations where everyone benefits and no one is harmed…thought it doesn’t seem that way for a LONG time.
The first 2/3 of Relay is a reminder why the wily movie vets always say “they don’t make em like they used to.” The stakes are clear: how is this one guy gonna help this helpless woman evade the smorgasbord of resources designed to stop them? Director David Mackenzie and writer Justin Piasecki go hyperdetail oriented on Tom’s operation, to wonderful effect. Tom is using corporations’ own tactics against them; he finds these bureaucratic loopholes and exploits them with simple, effective precision. Each way Tom gains the upper hand isn’t plot magic; it feels grounded in the real world making the successes that much more fist pump worthy to the audience. Along the way, the director has to put both Tom and Sarah in harm’s way for these plans to execute properly, meaning the tension is high when someone is just walking down the street, or getting on a plane, or following someone with a bicycle. While face to face communication is impossible, Lily James and Riz Ahmed do a great job conveying how lonely they both are…and how excited especially Tom is to find a connection with someone, anyone, since he abandoned his past life entirely (Mackenzie amusingly and cleverly uses AA meetings to character dump). Relay’s set up proves you don’t need explosions or murder to keep the audience’s attention: you just need interesting people and well designed plot mechanics.
Until Relay has to end. For a movie so smart for so long, the ending is almost comical in how stupid it is. You can feel the writer and director had one big idea in mind to wow the audience, but to get there, a LOT of character assassination and logic jumps have to take place. Also, that big swing gives us no time really to assess the fallout, meaning the twists are just plot contrivances in search of greater meaning. The ending also goes for a big action sequence when Relay worked without them, sucking a lot of the good will out of the movie along with it.
So, Black Bag, you’re still the turn back the clock thriller of the year. Relay might have scared you there for a minute, but the movie slipped up enough for Michael Fassbender to put a bullet in its skull and move on. Sorry, too much, my bad. That’s not fair to Riz Ahmed, who is really great in this.