After a serious drought of good movies there suddenly seemed to be a surfeit of quality cinema which is why Jo and I saw two movies in a week! Yesterday we went to see Argo which was playing at Metro as a matinee show. We had a few errands to run at Crawford Market and just about made it while the opening scenes played out on screen. We didn’t miss much and were soon caught up in the wonderful thrilling story of a dramatic rescue of six America Foreign Service personnel who had manage to escape from the American Embassy which was seized by the Iranian Revolutionaries.

Tony Mendez comes up with this simply wild idea of bringing out the fugitives as a Canadian movie crew which had gone to Iran to scout for locations! Brilliantly executed with a nail biting finish, the several tense moments were lightened by a dark humour so subtle that you could almost miss it. For a change Ben Affleck‘s impassive face stood him in good stead as the enigmatic CIA operative Tony Mendez. As for the rest,  the inimitable Alan Arkin as the movie mogul , John Goodman as the makeup artist to whom this movie is dedicated and the rest of the cast are totally credible. In fact the plot was reminiscent of the old Arthur Hailey movies with a archetypical characters – the good Diplomat,  the sceptic, the scaredy cat, the shady housekeeper and ultimately  the success of the mission , that I actually felt it was not a true story at all but a pure figment of imagination! Having heard of so many CIA gaffes and rescue bids that went wrong, I was astonished that this covert CIA operation did really happen ! 

Verdict – Go see this one! And fast.