In the streaming age, there is an obvious appetite for globe-trotting, multilingual thrillers such as Liaison. Starting in Syria, before crossing to France and Britain, via an encounter with Russian mercenaries and a heart-stopping moment at the Turkish border, it follows Vincent Cassel and Eva Green as they track hackers who have stolen information that is very, very important. But it is hard to work out who is in search of what in this convoluted mess of official government bodies, unofficial contractors – and Peter Mullan as a UK minister who spends too much time in what looks like the losers’ cafe from The Apprentice.
It opens in Damascus, with Gabriel (Cassel) careering around a drunken house party, before a flashy drone shot diverts our attention across town to a hacker working in an abandoned building. Naturally, the hacking goes down to the wire, but the hacker and his collaborator eventually escape and attempt to make their way to France, to let Europe know what terrible things they have uncovered when they were sneaking a look at Bashar al-Assad’s iCloud.
