In Relay, Riz Ahmed’s Manhattan fixer Ash is not one to raise his voice – or say anything at all.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
Relay
Directed by David Mackenzie
Written by Justin Piasecki
Starring Riz Ahmed, Lily James and Sam Worthington
Classification 14A; 112 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 22
If you are going to make a movie about a “fixer” – those shadowy figures who are called into action in the dead of night to clean up all manner of filthy messes that the cops won’t or shouldn’t touch – then you had better ensure that your film isn’t in need of its own fix.
Blessedly, the cinematic ratio has so far been on the fixer’s side, with such classics as Michael Clayton, Killing Them Softly and Pulp Fiction (at least the scenes featuring Harvey “Mr. Wolf” Keitel) finding immense pleasures in watching smooth talkers untangle impossibly knotty affairs. But then you get duds like last year’s Wolfs, a middle-of-the-pack diversion that even professional onscreen fixers George Clooney and Brad Pitt couldn’t save. And then there’s Relay.
After premiering at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival to a muted response, director David Mackenzie’s corporate-espionage flick has finally slipped onto screens in the dog days of summer, a sleepy debut that even the sloppiest fixer would cry foul over.
Not that the film’s Manhattan fixer Ash (Riz Ahmed) is one to raise his voice, or say anything at all. In the film’s one big burst of creativity, Ash’s highly-priced services are arranged strictly through a telephone relay system, an old-school service that’s used by those with a hearing or speech disability to make and receive calls by text, with the assistance of interchangeable operators. Unlike traditional calls, texts or e-mails, the messages – which Ash types out using a clunky device that resembles an answering machine crossed with a typewriter – cannot be traced or subpoenaed, allowing complete anonymity.
TIFF speaker series to include Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds
What does Spike Lee need from Denzel Washington on their fifth go-round? ‘The key word is trust’
This method comes in especially handy when Ash takes on a client named Sarah (Lily James), a pharmaceutical-industry scientist who is on the run from a hit squad hired by her former bosses (led by an amusingly, and perpetually, angry Sam Worthington). As Ash guides Sarah to safety, and sends her pursuers on one wild goose chase after another, there is no small amount of fun to be had in watching next-generation goons get fooled by such dang-near-analogue tech.
Initially, Mackenzie also seems to be having a ball playing in the same grey space – both morally and aesthetically – as Michael Clayton‘s Tony Gilroy, with Relay finding quiet, sleek menace in the margins of a boardroom or the back of an anonymous surveillance van. And there is a distinct pleasure in watching the director (best known for the 2016 drama Hell or High Water) put Ahmed’s character through the palm-sweat paces, forcing the fixer to gradually lose his cool and embrace a jittery kind of high-stakes anxiety.
But as nice as it is to see New York play itself or watch Ahmed and Worthington run circles around each other, the entire caper is rendered unsolvable by one big, meatheaded twist that undermines everything that came before. And not in a, “Jeez, I better rewatch this movie to see how the filmmakers possibly pulled it off!” way, either. More as in, “Wow, not a single scene of this film now makes emotional or narrative sense.”
Perhaps realizing that they have broken the laws of logic, Mackenzie and his screenwriter, Justin Piasecki, proceed to turn Ash into a Jason Bourne-like one-man wrecking ball, a move that can only be appreciated by those few poor souls who remember when Ahmed played, essentially, another fixer’s mark in the fifth Bourne film. Quick, someone call Jason. Or Michael Clayton. I guess any of the Ocean’s boys will do.
