Let’s not kid ourselves with polite hedging: “Classified” isn’t a calamity—it’s the industrial accident of modern cinema, a three-car pile-up in the middle of a screenplay dust storm. If negative stars were an option, I’d be petitioning for a rating system that allowed for black holes, just to properly suck the memory of this thing from my mind.
—I can almost hear Aaron Eckhart’s agent quitting by text mid-shoot, and honestly, who would blame him? After the migraine-inducing misfire of “Chief of Station,” one might have hoped Eckhart would aim for at least a soft landing. What we get instead is a career swan dive into concrete, all in slow-motion. (And can we pause for a moment of silence for the digital space wasted above with the (entirely unnecessary) trailer? Of course, the marketing team would sooner sell you the sizzle, since the steak's gone bad in the freezer.)
The premise, on paper, could have been salvageable—an aging CIA operative (Eckhart) stumbles onto a nest of lies, only to join forces with his MI6-analyst daughter (Abigail Breslin) for a family vacation through the underworld’s filing cabinets. But “Classified” doesn’t merely drop the ball, it trips over its shoelaces and goes face first into the orchestra pit. The dialogue is such a festival of groans, stuffed with clichés and “As you know, Bob” platitudes, that you have to wonder if the writers held their brainstorming sessions in a self-help aisle. Is it plagiarism if the script feels like it was auto-generated by a sleep-deprived chatbot? At least then, we’d have the comfort of blaming the algorithm.
As for the acting—oh, sweet mercy. The cast moves as if they know they’re guilty accomplices to a cinematic crime. Eckhart’s line readings have all the verve of a man scanning his spam folder. Breslin, once the luminous child prodigy, is now reduced to playing second fiddle to mediocrity, only occasionally glancing up from her own regret to hit a punchline with the faintest glimmer of visible life. It’s not just underplaying; it’s emotional austerity measures. You can almost see the invoices being tallied behind their eyes.
And yet, somewhere amid this Everest of inertia, Breslin herself manages to slip in a handful of half-sparkling lines—a nervous tic of wit, a flash of actual timing. It is, for a brief nanosecond, the movie equivalent of finding a peanut in your jar of mayonnaise: a taste of something real, instantly drowned out by the surrounding mess.
Let’s talk craft—because someone needs to. Edits appear to have been stitched together with the mad logic of a ransom note, with characters teleporting into new outfits between shots like they’ve been caught up in a witness-protection program mid-scene. The special effects are less “state-of-the-art” than “public access cable,” and the script is so thin it might float away if you exhaled too hard in the theater. Did anyone check if the continuity editor survived the edit bay?
Action sequences? If by “action” you mean “a bewildering round of gunfire where the extras drop like flies while Eckhart and Breslin emerge as bulletproof Looney Tunes,” sure. There’s a point where Eckhart, finding himself outgunned, sensibly jettisons his assault rifle (why keep useful weapons?) and launches into some sort of martial artistry that looks less “elite field agent” and more “last pick for the after-school dojo.” The choreography here is a wordless plea for mercy.
And the hand-to-hand combat? It’s as if the director secretly despises logic. We're meant to accept—no, embrace—the spectacle of a grizzled spy flinging away his only defense just to lurch into a muddled punch-up with anonymous henchmen. Has anyone on set ever spoken to an actual grown-up? The only code of conduct here is a commitment to baffling the audience until we surrender.
A smidge of chemistry occasionally flickers between Breslin and Eckhart, yet like fireflies trapped in a Tupperware, it’s quickly extinguished by the vacuum of credibility elsewhere. And the Maltese vistas? Lovely, I assume—if you aren’t too distracted by the flaming garbage tumbleweed of the plot rolling past them. Malta deserves better postcards.
“Classified” is so thoroughly derailed that it feels less like a film and more like a dare. The dialogue is execrable, the action a parody of itself, the plot a scrapheap of impulses, and the logic an elaborate riddle without a punchline. If Breslin’s side-eye ever wins an Oscar, it’ll be for surviving this material.
If you feel charitable toward cinematic misfires so resounding they collapse into dark comedy, maybe you’ll harvest a laugh or two. But don’t mistake these moments for redemption: “Classified” is a betrayal, not just of the action genre, but of the whole idea that we upgrade celluloid to digital in hope of progress. Film fans, do yourselves a favor—file this one under “permanent classified.”
