Argo - 2012 - 3 Stars

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Kyle Chandler

Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, thrice is a trend and after seeing Ben Affleck's latest film Argo, I think it's fair to say that Ben Affleck is a pretty damn good director who is capable of consistently making entertaining, albeit superficial Hollywood thrillers. Argo is based on the true story of a CIA agent who went undercover as a film producer scouting locations for a sci-fi film in Iran so he could smuggle American hostages back home during the Iran hostage crisis of  1980.

Argo is a competently shot film that is well-edited, especially during large suspense set pieces where the audience different people performing disparate actions in various locations in close to real time. However, while those segments are well-edited they do strain credulity as we are regularly forced to believe that people halfway across the world are coincidentally performing actions at the last second to save our ragtag group of misfits. When used sparingly yhese kinds of scenarios are classic tension builders in heist movies, but are employed so frequently throughout Argo that crowd-pleasing gears of the movie's plot start showing.

Affleck's pedigree must have helped in casting, where in addition to the names above Richard Kind, Phillip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton and other familiar character actors regularly steal scenes when given the chance to.
It's a fun caper that is already getting some undeserved Oscar buzz, because it's about an important moment in recent American history and is being publicized as a historical drama instead of a light caper. The final shots of the movie was offputting and felt like a cynical attempt to garner pathos for the hero and generate even more oscar buzz, but ultimately Argo is an entertaining two hours and a well-executed, funny, suspenseful, Hollywood thriller, something which is becoming increasingly rare.