Chief of Station has Aaron Eckhardt as a CIA agent who sees his CIA agent wife die in a horrible explosion in front of him. Six months later, the CIA IG is giving him the business about it, which gets his gears going. Could there be more to her death than just the accidental gas main leak the authorities were chalking it up to? After he does some digging, turns out it was just an unfortunate gas main leak, and the rest of the film is Eckhardt wandering aimlessly through grocery stores and enjoying coffee at cafes in Europe... NOT! Ho ho, didn't see that coming, did you? It's as spy thriller-y as you'd expect, as Eckhardt has to see which Johnson mainstays he can trust as he tries to get to the bottom of things and save his son, who the baddies grabbed while the son was getting some in Croatia.
This is a pretty good deal. As far as Jesse V. Johnson goes, I wouldn't put it in my top five of his films, but for 90 minutes on Hulu, it's going to be better than the bulk of the DTV stuff you'll find on there. Eckhardt is great in the lead, and then Johnson pulls in some great names in supporting roles that have worked with him before, like Olga Kurylenko, Daniel Bernhardt, and Nina Bergman, plus a fun performance by Alex Pettyfer. There are some parts earlier on where things are a bit slower, plus we have a gratuitous torture scene that was unnecessary--more on that later--but when you have a tight runtime, great names used well, and solid action when it's there, those things can be forgiven in a way that a longer movie with a bunch of names in one-scene cameos and a lot of bad computer effects can't.
When I looked at the names of directors who were already in the Hall of Fame, I realized that Jesse V. Johnson was going to be passing some of them for tags once we started catching up on his filmography (this one at 13 ties him for third all-time with Hall of Famer Sam Firstenberg), and when I factored in the longevity of his career as a director--roughly 25 years--and some of the classics he's done, like Avengement or Savage Dog, I saw it was time to get him in. When you go from 2017 to 2024, he has 13 films released, and while I haven't seen them all, the 10 I have seen are all pretty solid. To be able to pull that off in the current DTV climate, where budgets are shrinking and the more cynical approach is to just slap a bunch of names on the tin and get in and out for as little money as possible, Johnson has been able to successfully navigate that and continue to provide a level of quality that us action fans appreciate. Much deserving of his Hall of Fame induction this year, here's to you Mr. Johnson, you're one of the greats.
The last time we saw Aaron Eckhard, it was in the film Erased, which we've not only reviewed on the site, but featured in a podcast episode, all the way back in episode 13 in the archives, a little over ten years ago in September of 2014--and that film also had Olga Kurylenko. It looks like he's now working as a DTV leading man, as this is the fourth of five films he's had come out between 2023 and now. I really liked him here, he's the kind of leading man you'd want in a movie like this, whether he's just looking good in a suit, wandering aimlessly in a grocery store as he thinks about his late wife, scowling at a computer screen while he's trying to make sense of the cryptic data in front of him, or beating up a bunch of guys at a poker game while a mustachioed Russian spy Nick Moran looks on. I could joke that he's an elevated Thomas Jane, but we saw from One Ranger that Jane brings something completely different to the table--Jane wouldn't have worked as well as the lead in this film, and Eckhardt wouldn't have worked in One Ranger the way Jane did. I don't know how much we'll get into Eckhardt's burgeoning DTV oeuvre, but based on the numbers, I imagine this won't be the last time we see him here--he has another with Johnson in production, Thieves Highway, so we know we'll be doing that one at least--and if this performance is any indication, I'll be looking forward to it.
Speaking of Kurylenko, she has a smaller, but very impactful part in this. She's kind of Ghost in the Machine-ish, only Johnson teases her earlier in the film, so I guess Chekhov's Kurylenko beats Kurylenko as Ghost in the Machine. Her entry is such a badass scene, and even though her character wears a ski mask at first, you know it's her before she removes it. She comes in while Aaron Eckhardt is being tortured for information and saves him, which made the torture scene unnecessary--if she's just going to save him, why not have her come in before he has needles stuck under his fingernails and charged with electricity? The other problem with it was it required bandage continuity, because Eckhard had the fingers that were used in the torture wrapped, but some scenes it looked like they weren't. Just save us the discomfort of having to watch that, and the script supervisor the trouble of having to keep up with it, and have Kurylenko save Eckhardt before he's tortured, it's so much easier. Anyway, Kurylenko has a ton of stuff in her filmography that we need to get to, plus, a bunch of new things coming--and I can't wait to see her on the big screen next year in Thunderbolts--so it's just a matter of me getting caught up on it all. She's continuing to make a name for herself as one of the top women in the action world, and I can't wait to see what else she has for us, but for now, she's great here in a smaller role.
Finally, a name that is probably overdue for his own Hall of Fame induction, Daniel Bernhardt is great in this as a baddie. I was trying to figure out why he wasn't in already, and I think it was because, while he was a mainstay in the early days of the site, especially with his Bloodsport sequels, in the late 2000s when bigger names like Seagal and Van Damme were dropping down to DTV, and names like Bernhardt were getting fewer leading roles, instead of trying to force it with lower-tier stuff, he went with smaller parts in bigger films. Stunt work and fight scenes in movies like The Matrix Reloaded, which led to bigger things like John Wick, it didn't mean he wasn't doing DTV stuff, but it wasn't as much, and I kind of lost track of him myself--though when I look at his tags on here, which is now at 16, I've haven't completely lost him, he's had some recent reviews. I think it's just an oversight on my part, but we can pencil him in for next year's inductions.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Hulu in the States, which I think is a good deal, but if you live in an area where this is a rental only, you could do a lot worse. And congratulations to Jesse V. Johnson on entering the Hall of Fame! It's much deserved.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21301418
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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