Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (August 1, 2021)
Best-known in the US for 2008’s over the top action flick Wanted, director Timur Bekmambetov returns with 2021’s Profile. This offers a wholly different kind of thriller, one with roots in real life events.
A prologue tells us that many young European women left their homes after they became recruited by Muslim terrorists online. Eager to expose these techniques, London journalist Amy Whittaker (Valene Kane) sets up a fake Facebook profile as “Melody Lewis”, a 20-something who claims she recently converted to Islam.
Amy/”Melody” quickly hears from Abu Bilel Al-Britani (Shazad Latif), another former Brit now in Syria. As she delves deeper into this world, Amy finds herself more and more submerged in propaganda that might eventually turn her into a victim.
In the late 1990s/early 2000s, “found footage” movies like The Blair Witch Project became a big deal. That format wore out its welcome for the most part, so computer-based tales like Profile seem like a way to expand on these horizons.
On the positive side, this format allows Profile to give us an unusual cinematic experience. While not the first film to go down this route, it still offers something out of the ordinary, and that gives the flick an intriguing twist.
In theory, at least. Unfortunately, the reality seems substantially less interesting.
Because of the limited format, we find ourselves mainly stuck with endless shots of Amy on Skype. While this makes sense for the narrative, it doesn’t lend itself to an engaging movie, and Profile indeed tends to drag and seem less than engaging.
Most of the flick just features dull online conversations between Amy and Bilal. These rarely offer anything other than banal nothing.
Granted, that seems logical in a real-world sense, as most chats of this sort would probably seem pretty dull to outsiders. Nonetheless, the scenes become redundant and boring too much of the time.
For the movie to work, we need to send Bilal as a master manipulator, and that never occurs. He uses fairly lame techniques to seduce Amy, and while these might seem likely to succeed with immature teens, they make less sense with a late 20-something like Amy.
Again: yeah, I know people in the “real world” behave stupidly all the time. However, it doesn’t feel right in this circumstance given that Amy goes into her endeavors with the expectation that she’ll be manipulated.
Amy should keep her eyes wide open the entire time, but as the story progresses, she drops her intense mix of fear and cynicism to turn into a moony girl in love. If the movie wants us to accept this transition, it needs to depict Amy’s relationship with Bilal as more dynamic than it does.
This leaves us with all those dull Skype chats and little to convince us that a smart, skeptical woman like Amy would fall for Bilal’s cheesy methods. It also means we find a slow movie that never feels especially urgent or dramatic.
Sure, the narrative digs more into the threats against Amy at the end. However, at that point we just don’t really care, mainly because Amy eventually comes across as such a dope that we lose our investment in her, if we ever had one in the first place.
Profile never presents Amy as an especially interesting role, another problem since the entire film revolves around her. She seems kind of like a superficial twit much of the time, so our ability to sink our teeth in her journey sags.
As does the film as a whole. Profile comes with a gimmicky approach that offers intrigue but the movie itself seems too slow and boring to succeed.
