The Ghost (Roman Polanski, 2010)

Ewan McGregor, once again essaying his estuaries accent and again playing a cocky journo who finds himself in deep water, is commissioned to finish off the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister who's embroiled in accusations of war crimes over terrorist renditions. Then the ghost writer starts to uncover a murkier chain of events that led to the death of his predecessor and the facts behind the allegations against the Prime Minister.
For tone, think Polanski's Frantic; as for the wider plot besides the thriller element, Pierce Brosnan's PM is a barely veiled Tony Blair.
The first element works with Polanski's customary elan and efficiency, and generates a gripping Hitchcockian suspense that's mercifully unreliant on Hollywood's customary guns and chases. The second sticks in the craw too much, though: it's clear that neither Robert Harris, whose housebrick of a Ludlumer the film is based on, nor Polanski, who obviously just has a rather large axe to grind against the US, have a well-thought out notion of how the CIA meddling in another country's political affairs might actually work. So Brosnan's character remains a prima donna pastiche, and the fuzzy development of the background plot leads to some glaring illogicalities in the thriller element by the end.
It would have been nice then, if such a potentially weighty topic hadn't ended up as stylised hokum. But at least it's moody hokum, and some of the terse dialogue really does sparkle.

6/10