With a significant number of Americans in the dangerous sway of a well-disseminated illusion, any stories that help us understand the psychology behind believing a con artist, and why such lies work, become a little more valuable in this day and age.
The tale of British sociopath Robert Freegard’s wreckage is one of those jaw-droppers you can’t help but want to parse, but it’s been turned into the only mildly illuminating, dimly effective thriller “Rogue Agent,” starring James Norton as Freegard, and Gemma Arterton as a lawyer who falls under his spell.
Netflix subscribers whose algorithms push scam-driven titles to the forefront will already be aware of Freegard from this year’s three-part documentary “The Puppet Master,” which grimly recounted his persuasive schemes, and the shattered victims his masquerades left behind. What “Rogue Agent” co-directors–screenwriters Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson have attempted is both to put you inside the power of Freegard’s tale-spinning, and to mine suspense from how he was exposed and tracked down.
With Arterton’s voiceover detailing the traits of a master spy (looking into their eyes, telling people a story they want to hear), the movie opens on an English village near an agricultural college in 1993, where Norton’s Freegard has taken a job tending bar at a pub. After befriending a male student named Ian (Rob Malone) and female students Sophie (Marisa Abela, “Industry”) and Mae (Freya Mavor), he lets on that he’s an MI5 agent trying to uncover an IRA cell. Soon this trio are following his lead as eager recruits, until he convinces them their lives are in danger, and they need to drop everything and flee with him, that he’ll protect them.
Nearly a decade later, Freegard is a luxury car salesman with his eye on the sexy, high-powered lawyer Alice Archer (Arterton) walking by the dealership each day. His charm offensive wins her over, but even after Alice’s friend (Julian Barratt) checks him out and finds him suspicious, she enters into a relationship with a guy she believes to be kind and goofily romantic (he dances to George Michael in a towel on their lovers’ getaway), an undercover security operative hoping to get out of the trade and go into business with her.
When it brutally sinks in who he is — not just a thieving impostor, but a brainwasher and possibly a kidnapper — Alice discovers Freegard is known to law enforcement and sets about bringing him to justice by browbeating a detective (Shazad Latif) into helping her, and later an FBI agent (Edwina Findley). The clock is ticking, however, when a vulnerable American woman (Sarah Goldberg, “Barry”) enters Freegard’s orbit at the time he’s most desperate.
“Rogue Agent” gives itself the tricky job of wanting us seduced, disturbed, and agitated, but in toggling between the perspectives of suave criminal and crusading victim — a feat of pacing that editor Mags Arnold (“The Trip to Spain”) is very much up to — the movie too often settles for nighttime-soap vibes, when the reality of Freegard’s evil manipulations beg for a more unsettling treatment.
Norton’s fine, but his glossy good looks are almost an impediment; his Freegard is more smoldering Lifetime-movie cad or — ironically, as the title implies — outlaw on a mission than everyday devil starring in his own hidden horror film. Neither the filmmakers nor Norton seem interested in tapping into any squishy undercurrents that might ground Freegard as a ripped-from-real-life figure.
On the other hand, Arterton’s flinty energy, as she goes from blindsided prey to near-vigilante, is a perfectly entertaining fit for the filmmakers’ more genre-driven, matching-wits-with-a-villain aims. Her succumbing is believable as a matter of the heart, and her second-half drive to nab him is appealingly righteous.
Also sharply rendered is Abela’s transformed Sophie, the most far-gone victim, as well as Goldberg’s character. The latter’s predicament is turned into a race-against-time climax different from how things really went down for Freegard, but as far as this particular version’s dramatic license goes, it ties up its arcs with suspenseful efficiency. (Many of the movie’s characters have had their names changed, and Alice is a composite.)
But after that ending, when onscreen text serves up a few vital facts about what happened to Freegard, we’re left wondering if this serviceably paced yet middlebrow thriller did all it could to convey the sheer weirdness of his crimes, the psychological complexities that were involved, and the difficulty in stopping someone like him from plying his awful gifts again. “Rogue Agent” is plenty fascinated by the abridged version of this saga — bad men are out there — but you’ll wish for that darker, less cleanly shaped telling the more you think about its scarier contours.
“Rogue Agent” opens August 12 in US theaters and on AMC+.