One of my favorite movies from my days before I regularly watched movies was Enemy of the State. It was one of those movies that both entertained you and made you think, focusing attention on the surveillance state long before 9/11 made it trendy to do so.
Closed Circuit gets the entertaining part down, with a plot that is not overly surprising but has enough twists to keep you interested. It’s a tightly-wound suspense that revolves around a pair of lawyers chosen to defend the alleged mastermind of a bombing that kills 120 people in Britain. But they begin to think that there’s more at play than a straightforward terrorism case.
But Closed Circuit is not as ambitious as Enemy of the State — and if it is, then it fails. The film never quite seems to make any points about the surveillance state and the extent that Western nations have been willing to go to prevent terrorism, instead simply nodding in the direction of those issues and moving on. It’s an entertaining movie, and one that might give you something to contemplate for a moment or two, but nothing that’s going to change your mind or even cause it to work that much.
