As Mason is trying to negotiate a peaceful way to extricate Karim safely and not disrupt his party or his family, Karim’s brother’s people show up and everything goes to hell. A friend and colleague of Mason’s named Cal ( Mark Pellegrino) comes to him and gives him shattering news-their 13-year-old ward Karim is the younger brother of a known terrorist, the man responsible for orchestrating the Munich Olympics attack, and there’s reason to believe that Karim has been in contact with his sibling. diplomat just before the worst night of his life. Hamm plays Mason, who we meet in 1972 as a happy U.S. As such, this is Hamm’s best leading role to date, a reminder of how good he can be when he’s given the right material. He’s a great writer when it comes to dismantling traditional star power, and Hamm fits that model perfectly.
Gilroy loves handsome men forced into morally gray areas, writing such roles for George Clooney (“ Michael Clayton”), Clive Owen (“ Duplicity”), and Matt Damon (he wrote the original Bourne trilogy). On paper, Tony Gilroy seems like the perfect writer for Jon Hamm. He’s been great in supporting roles in films like “ The Town” and “ Baby Driver,” but a lead role that took advantage of his charisma never really came. After the award-winning success of “Mad Men,” the world kept waiting for filmmakers to translate Jon Hamm’s star power to the big screen … and it never really happened. To enjoy “Beirut,” one needs to look at it less as an examination of a place and more as a vehicle for a star. Mason calls it a boarding house, but “Beirut” seems remarkably uninterested in the actual cultural identity of the people who live there.
However, it’s difficult to shake the sense that some of what’s happening here is that classic Middle Eastern villainous set dressing-bearded men, lit in shadows, with generic Arabic music playing in the background. And the fact that this is a period piece helps explain the change of filming venue as Beirut 35 years ago looked nothing like it looks today. Yes, it’s true that the trailer doesn’t come close to capturing the intricacies of the plot here, one of those classic Tony Gilroy contraptions in which the American characters, especially those hiding under government orders, are complicit and arguably more truly evil than the people on the ground. (And the fact that it filmed in Morocco and not Lebanon didn’t help that controversy.) So, the first question in your mind may be to the validity of these complaints. In the opening scenes of “Beirut,” the suave Mason Skiles ( Jon Hamm) describes the location that also gives Brad Anderson’s new film a title as a “boarding house without a landlord.” This kind of dismissive chatter about a tumultuous part of the world is likely going to inflame the recent controversy about the perception that “Beirut” is just another film that uses the Middle East for backdrops and bad guys.