dennisdmcdonald

KIDON is an entertaining and convoluted "sting" movie in which an Israeli Mossad team tries to find out who is responsible for the death of a Palestinian agent in diplomatically sensitive Dubai. In the background there's a high-stakes duel between France and the United States for a massive Middle Eastern nuclear reactor construction deal.But that's secondary. The fast-paced storyline is like a combination of SNATCH and THE USUAL SUSPECTS with a bit of BOURNE thrown in. Plus we get the usual silly computer hacker tricks straight out of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.No matter, we're only here for fun and the story only occasionally veers from caper into the dark side. We are, after all, being entertained by a motley group for whom larceny and murder are supposedly a way of life. But the humor, surprises, and nonstop cleverness take up the viewer's attention leaving little time to consider plot holes and improbabilities. For some another bright spot will be that the Americans and the CIA are not the bad guys in this film!

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Nozz

Kidon starts with an intriguing premise: Suppose that the 2010 assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh (if you've forgotten it, check Wikipedia) took Israel's General Security Service, the Mossad, completely by surprise, but the assassination team has escaped to Israel and the Mossad is rounding them up and finding out how the hit was accomplished. The script has a problem handling this situation, though. The audience-- a well-informed audience, at least-- knows more or less how the hit was accomplished, so there's no suspense in the retelling. Nor is there any great adventure in capturing the assassination team; that seems to go relatively smoothly. So aside from a few offhand jokes about current events, there is nothing much to keep the audience interested for the first hour or so. There is an abundance of characters introduced-- too many to easily keep straight-- but although the actors are competent (and many, in Israel at least, are familiar and well liked) the characters are not well rounded enough to engage the audience. It's only after an hour's wait that plot twists begin to develop, giving new significance to what the audience has already seen. And from that point the plot twists never stop, progressively revealing what previously hadn't been apparent as we watched, but they can't turn the one-hour wait interesting in retrospect when it wasn't interesting at the time, and they don't involve us any more deeply in the characters.

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