97 min | R | September 2, 2022 | Lionsgate
A wiretap surveillance agent watches a high-stakes drug operation from a dark room full of monitors. Then the suspects find out he is listening, and the room becomes a trap. The premise promises a thriller and delivers a screensaver.
Justin Rosa works the wire room. He sits alone in a windowless surveillance hub and monitors a suspect tied to a drug cartel. The bust goes wrong, the suspects learn they are being watched, and Rosa becomes the target while his superior feeds him orders by phone. Matt Eskandari builds the film as a single-location standoff between a man at a desk and the violence outside his door. The structure wants to be tense and contained. It is mostly a man staring at screens.
Kevin Dillon plays Rosa as a hardened agent with a chip on his shoulder, and he carries nearly every scene by himself. He reacts to events he cannot reach and people he can only hear, which strands him in a performance built entirely on phone calls and monitor feeds. Bruce Willis plays Shane Mueller, Rosa’s supervising agent, and his role is a voice on a line and a handful of cutaways. Willis registers almost nothing. He delivers his lines flat and stationary, a presence reduced to a contractual obligation. Texas Battle plays Sheriff Roberts and Oliver Trevena plays the suspect Eddie Flynn, but the script gives them types rather than characters.
Eskandari directs from a screenplay by Brandon Stiefer that confines the action to the surveillance room and the feeds Rosa watches. The cinematography drowns the set in cold blue monitor glow and keeps the camera locked on faces in dim light. That choice flattens the geography of the building and kills the tension a single-location thriller needs. The editing cross-cuts between Rosa’s room and the exterior assault, but the two spaces never connect into a coherent threat. The sound design leans on phone static and gunfire to manufacture urgency the staging does not earn.
This is a thriller that mistakes a man watching screens for a man in danger. The single-location concept can generate dread when the walls feel like they are closing in. Here the walls just sit there. Stiefer’s script keeps explaining its own stakes through dialogue because the images never establish them, and Willis hovers over the whole thing as a reminder of what the production could not afford. The film has one idea and no way to make it move.