Boring. Yeah, you’ve heard “good things” about this film. Have you seen it? I have. All 161 minutes. And believe me, the time did not fly. The Secret Agent is a film with neither a secret, nor an agent, let alone both in one. The film mostly is a Brazilian police procedural without any police procedure going on.
Does Brazil need to be introduced to the police procedural? They might like it.
It’s semi-rural Brazil in 1977 and, hey, there’s a dead body near a field. OK, promising start. Whatchagonnado next? Examine the body? Find some clues? Show us some bad guys?
None of that.
Oh, ok, what will you show me instead, movie?
Armando (Wagner Moura), a former teacher has moved to Recife during Carnival. This is his movie. Get used to him.
What’s up with Armando? Oh don’t worry; we will find out. The picture is going to spend the next two full hours establishing Armando, a normal guy who has fled his family because there is a hit out on him. Why is there a hit out on him? Well, it’s personal…and while the film saw fit to describe Armando in detail for the next 2.5 hours, it didn’t see the need for describing why there might be a hit out on him.
And after the film has established Armando, it establishes Armando a little more … and then a little more after that. Somewhere in between, there’s a bizarre substory about a severed leg that comes to life and attacks gay people in the park. But after that irrelevance, we’re back to establishing Armando, because the film hasn’t done so enough already.
I should point out here that Armando is a former teacher employed in the city archives under a pseudonym, but at no time would we ever describe him as a 
secret agent. It’s possible this translation from Portuguese to English means something different, but I’m seriously doubting “O Agente Secreto” got mistranslated.
The pace picks up with about 15 minutes to go, just in time to wake me from a good nap and wonder what I was doing there. Was it enough to save the film? Dude, it wasn’t even enough to save this paragraph.
As of this writing, The Secret Agent is the favorite for the foreign film Oscar with an outside chance of a Best Picture nomination. All of that baffles me. The film I saw was primarily long, punctuated by an odd thing I didn’t understand, and concluded anticlimactically. It’s possible I was tired. It’s possible I wasn’t in the mood for a three-hour foreign film. Or, I dunno, maybe, just maybe, the film was boring as Hell and nobody wants to admit it.
There once was a teacher named Armando
Who up and flees from his family’s condo
For the mob called a hit
Now he’s in the shit
But you’re gonna spend hours wondering: “Quando?”
Rated R, 161 Minutes
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Writer: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Genre: Slow death
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Film critics who are not me, apparently
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Me
