Russian
cult director Timur Bekmambetov’s follow up to his 2016 commercial bomb Ben Hur (the third remake), a webcam
thriller called Profile involving a
journalist who goes undercover investigating ISIS recruiters, is another one of
those movies shelved for years before being dumped into theaters amid the
COVID-19 pandemic ala The Empty Man.Completed in 2018 the film comes to theaters
now through Focus Features and is a loose docudrama adaptation of Anne Erelle’s
nonfiction book In the Skin of a Jihadist
through the computer chatroom lens of Unfriended. Despite
strong performances from the film’s two leads, Valene Kane as the journalist
Amy Whittaker who creates a new fake Facebook profile of a woman who recently
converted to Islam and Shazad Latif as the charismatic but dangerous recruiter
Bilel, Bekmambetov’s film joins the likes of September Tapes as another trashy found footage flick masquerading
as a topical issues discourse.Moreover,
it comes to theaters at a time when the last thing anyone wants to do is look
at more ZOOM videochat screens.
Courtesy of Focus Features
Having
produced Searching as well as Unfriended: Dark Web, this new
inexplicably $2.3 million movie (where’d all that money go?) shows Bekmambetov
as one of the subgenre of mockumentary cinema verite style thiller’s biggest
new purveyors, for good or for ill. That
said, while the subject matter being utilized here is indeed a disturbingly
ongoing real world problem, Bekmambetov’s film is an ultimately anticlimactic
dirge that neither advances the discussion nor the careers of the actors
involved. Skip it.
