The Deal (2005)

Christian Slater, Selma Blair, Angie Harmon and Robert Loggia star in a gripping tale of assassination, deception and corruption set in the high-stakes world of corporate investment and international oil trading. With America at war and in the grip of a crippling fuel crisis, Wall Street analyst Tom Grover (Slater) agrees to broker a lucrative deal between a Russian oil cartel and his investment firm's biggest client, lead by cold-blooded CEO Jared Tolson (Loggia). While juggling his growing attraction to newly-hired associate, Abby (Blair), and the advances of Anna (Harmon), a seductive businesswoman, Tom learns all is not what it seems with the deal. Digging deeper, he and Abby soon find themselves trapped in a dangerous web of treachery and murder that will keep you guessing until the very end.

disaster flick

No worthwhile
dialogue
cinematography
characters -
a triple threat.
The film is so bland they might as well
have been making it up as they went along.
Too bad, all those (credible) actors dressed up
an no place to go. April 25, 2008

Political Thriller? No, It's Just Another B-Thriller with So Many Familiar Plot Devices

`The Deal' starring Christian Slater (also co-exective producer) is at best a mediocre political thriller with no convincing views on international politics. No one interested in the news of the world would believe in the complicated plot though the script itself (by first-timer Ruth Epstein) is not without merit, especially when it deals with the ethics of corporate company and those who are working for them. But whatever good about it is buried deep in the film's preposterous story and the showy camera work.

The film's very confusing script starts with one premise - we are informed that the USA has been at war with the (fictional) "Arab Federation" for more than three years. The prices of gas and other things skyrocket because of the shortage of oil.

Now I know some people find the story intriguing. With all respect to them, I disagree. As seen in `Syriana' the Arabs have its own conflicting powers within themselves. And at war for as many as three years? The film seems to forget that for better or worse, America is the only superpower in the world now.

But let's forget that part for now. Christian Slater plays an ambitious executive who is in charge of an assessment report about the oilfield of a Russian oil company. However, there is something strange about the maps and figures, he realizes, and he and his girlfriend (Selma Blair) are pressed by the unknown forces to ignore certain things about the company in case.

Though `The Deal' deals with international politics, its story is only a standard thriller scenario. The film is apparently about the intricate foreign policies of the government or the company merger and its ethical aspect involving stockholders, but the truth is it is nothing but B-thriller with `Been-there-Done-that' situations. See the romance between Slater and Blair, for example. They kiss and hug in a hotel elevator (check), and next they make love, leaning on the wall (check). And there are also Russian mafias (check). The supports played by Robert Loggia and Colm Feore are just ciphers, but that is no surprise after these checks the filmmakers should have done.

`The Deal' should have been an intelligent thriller, considering the political issue it deals with while every character who is supposed to be working at somewhere like Wall Street keep on doing incredibly stupid decisions. It is a thriller, a so-so one, but its political aspect is needs much more polishing up. September 10, 2006

Weak, sloppy and boring

If you read the plot synopsis of The Deal and Syriana, they sound surprisingly similar. Someone uncovers some shenanigans related to the merger of two large oil companies. The potential for both intrigue and important information revelation here is tremendous.

While I do agree that this is a area desperately in need of discussion and presentation, I think The Deal is the worst possible vehicle for Hollywood to attempt to breach the walls of secrecy surrounding peak oil. In much the same way that The Day After Tomorrow was perhaps the worst vehicle to address global warming.

What is wrong with The Deal?

1) I could glean only 4 "facts" from this film: gas is 6$ per gallon, Blackstar provided 500,000 brls, Blackstar's reserves were valued at $20 billion, and oil reserves in the ground are valued at $3 x # of barrels in the ground (estimated at 7 billion). All of these facts are made-up. How many barrels a day does the US import? How many barrels of the world's reserve are located in the middle east? What is the rate of depletion in Saudi Arabia? What is OPEC's excess capacity? Given the enormity of actual useful facts, not one of any merit was presented.

Let's take a closer look at just the absurdly simple oil reserve valuation formula, shall we?

$3 x estimated # of barrels in the ground

From Energy Bulletin:
"In late 2003, Shell Oil, one of the world's largest publicly traded oil concerns, said that it had erroneously overbooked its proven oil and natural gas reserves by the equivalent of 3.9 billion barrels of oil.

The oil portion alone, about two-thirds of the revision, represents some $67.5 billion in potential future revenue, assuming moderate oil prices of $25 a barrel.

Reserve calculations, though technical and arcane, drive an oil company's prospects, much like revenue growth drives a technology company's outlook."

The fomula should probably be closer to

3 x price per barrel in USD x # of barrels provable reserves

So if a 3.39 billion brl reserve in ground is worth $67.5 billion at $25/brl
what is a 7 billion brl reserve in ground worth if gas is $6 per gallon?

Even a conservative estimate of the value of 7 billion barrels of reserve is in the hundreds of billions of dollars range, not 20 billion. So they were off by at least an order of magnitude.

This is the kind of factual sloppiness that makes this movie such a travesty.

2) Hollywood uses the Russian Mafia the way they used to use neo-nazis, as a PC bogeyman. Given Russia's perennial involvement in the Great Game, I don't object to their involvement, but why not portray them accurately? The Russian Mafia is a perfect stand in for the current brand of klepto-capitalism. The new industrialists in Russia were oligarchs who allied with state bureaucrats to loot state-owned assets to fatten their offshore bank accounts. Here they are presented as brainless eurotrash who cant even succeed in keeping a Harvard MBA tied to a bed with nylon cord.

3) To classify the "enemy" of this war as the Confederation of Arab States, is to miss the central point of the conflict we are now in. Many of these states are our allies. There is no confederation, there are only faceless networks and splinter groups. There is no monolithic Arab State. Two minutes of stock war footage at the start of this film is the only explanation that there is a war. Later we learn that there is an embargo. Later still we learn that the "French or the Chinese" are presumably not involved in this war. Some obvious questions include, who are we bombing? Why? Where is the UN on this? There is exactly no reference to geopolitics at all.

4) Embargoes are ineffective in wartime. If the CAS embargoed the US, their revenue would drop to nothing. Let's suppose they decide to sell all of their output to China, India and Europe instead, how do they transport it? By tanker. Who has the largest navy in the world? The US. It is the US that would likely place an embargo on the CAS and sit at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and impound every tanker than tried to exit, once the shooting started.

The Pentagon,, the State Dept, the CIA, and numerous think tanks have spent years analyzing contingencies related to this hypothetical war. Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism expert, has just finished a novel called Scorpion's Gate about a coup by radical anti-western extremists in Saudi Arabia. This would be an excellent flashpoint around which to build a film like this. Yet there is no mention of any geopolitical forces at play or the nature of the conflict. The only thing at stake is some investment banker's reputation for signing a due diligence letter for a corporation that happens to have overvalued it's oil reserves. There is no mention of depletion, the scarcity is entirely the result of the embargo.

I realized that this film could have followed pretty much the exact same formula if the commodity in question had been gold, caviar or Persian rugs. Engineer a conflict which prevents the free flow of some scarce resource, then present a possibility of profit for the Russian Mafia to act as go-between and sell the product to the US. Also, if the main stumbling block was getting this merger approved, then why merge? The Russian shell company could just as easily continued to purchase oil from the CAS and repackage it for transshipment to the US. This is called arbitrage. **SPOILER** If the Russians were trying to hoodwink Tolson and split with their $25 million (????), then why was he the one preventing Hanson from doing the due diligence?

5) Why even bring in The Ethics Taskforce at the end of the film? (As if such a thing could possibly even exist after the Bush Administrations). Is the government complicit in this "merger?" Is that why the Senator covers up the whole scandal at the end? The most important person in this whole affair was the CEO of the large US oil company, Tolson. Wouldn't it be more interesting if Tolson bought his way onto the ticket and would up as either the Secretary of Defense or the VP? That they then engineer a coup by radical extremists in Saudi Arabia which shuts down the oil supply. Also, Christian Slater should have played the bad guy, he makes a terrific villain, and a horrible good guy. Selma Blair should have been the protagonist, the bright Harvard MBA who figures the whole thing out.

6) The Alternative Energy Tax Credit - I learned more about alternative energy sources on one episode of The West Wing last year. This was a total snipe hunt that detracted from the film as a whole, as if that is even possible.


November 29, 2005

The Deal is a pretty big deal of a movie

Here's a film that doesn't seem to have gotten a fair shake. The Deal is a darn good story about corruption, greed, oil, politics, murder, and all sorts of nasty things going on behind Wall Street doors by some of those three-piece suit types. Christian Slater is a fine actor, Selma Blair proves quite charming, and no movie has ever been hurt by the casting of Robert Loggia. The fact that such a story is all too believable in today's world serves as a hook of sorts - or maybe not. All I know is that The Deal is an effective thriller featuring some nice plot twists (although I did see some of them coming - and I'm not usually that good at picking up on things) inside a juicy story.

Here's the setting for the film: America is at war with the "Confederation of Arab states," gas is over six bucks a gallon and going nowhere but up, and the economy is seriously on the skids. Condor, led by its celebrated CEO Jared Tolson (Loggia), is working on a deal to ease America's gas shortage (not to mention fatten his pockets to overflowing) - a merger with Blackstar, a Russian company with deep oil reserves in Kazakhstan (well, supposedly). All he needs is a hot-shot Wall Street wonderboy from a prestigious company to sweet talk his board into accepting the deal - and that's where Tom Grover (Slater) comes in (after candidate #1, Grover's best friend, gets iced at the start of the movie). Grover works for an ultra-prestigious firm that is also feeling the economic crunch and could certainly use the $25 million dollars Tom will bring in just by helping Tolson sell the merger. He signs on, even though he isn't exactly an expert at evaluating geological reports, etc. That's actually one of the reasons he was chosen, though - Tolson's boys aren't exactly high on Grover doing a lot of research on the fields in question.

Representing the forces of good is Abbey Gallagher (Blair), a Harvard graduate who wants to save the world and has an innovative idea for helping those seeking alternative energy sources further their research. The snake pit of Wall Street is the last place she wants to be, but Gordon convinces her that his company can make her alternative energy dream a reality (because the company can make money by doing so). The two become close (apparently, Gordon has no qualms about dating an employee), which ultimately puts Abby in danger when Gordon finds out some disturbing truths about his big deal with Tolson. That, of course, sets the stage for a suspenseful ending. With himself and Abby in danger, his company sitting on a potential time bomb that could bring it to its knees, and - lest we forget - the national security interests of the whole country at stake, what will Gordon do? What can he do?

The Deal never manages to be edge-of-your-seat thrilling, but it is certainly suspenseful. It's also quite relevant in today's world of government corruption, unethical business practices, and moral ambiguity. The deal itself is the kind of thing J.R. Ewing would probably be cooking up if Dallas were still on the air - but J.R. would have done a better job of it. November 1, 2005

Moral Ambiguity of Wall Street

Christian Slater serves as Executive Producer & star of this drama. It's the kind of Wall Street high intrigue where ethics takes a back seat to profits. This is producer Harvey Kahn's 2nd turn as director after his straight-to-video film "Water's Edge" in 2002. Christian Slater plays Tom Hansen who comes into a deal with Condor Oil & Gas after his best friend is murdered. Slater who was first noticed in "The Name of the Rose" in 1986 with Sean Connery and then appeared in "Bed of Roses" & "Broken Arrow" in 1996 and in "Mindhunters" this year is an interesting and intense actor whose mannerisms remind me of Jack Nicholson. As Hansen, he works for a firm whose high ethical reputation Condor wants to use to put forward a shady billion dollar oil deal to import oil from an area in Russia in which there is no oil. The fact that it would be smuggled from Arab countries with which the U.S. has banned itself from doing business has resulted in the oil-laundering scheme. Robert Loggia who played with David Ducovney in "Return to Me" and was nominated for his lone Oscar nod as supporting actor in "Jagged Edge" in 1985 plays Jared Tolson, a high powered wheeler-dealer who includes assassination and kidnapping as necessary negotiating tools. Tolson passes the deal to Hansen, hoping his inexperience in oil will lead him to overlook the flaws in the deal. Slater's Hansen is having trouble finding a girl. Angie Harmon from the "Law & Order" TV series and the upcoming "Fun With Dick & Jane" with Jim Carrey & Tea Leoni plays Anna, who appears to have great interest in Tom, only to let her American accent drop and reveal she's an operative for the Russian mafia who will murder to make sure the deal goes through. After flirting with Anna, Hansen hires Abbey Gallagher, who he finally beds, only to drop her from the Condor deal when her life is threatened. Gallagher is played by Selma Blair from "Cruel Intentions," "Legally Blonde" & "The Fog." She investigates and puts her life in danger as she uncovers the truth about the deal. Gallagher's advisor is Professor Roseman played by John Heard who encourages her. Oil expert Hank at the firm is miffed that a novice like Hansen has been given the Condor deal and begins working to uncover the truth also. Played by Colm Feore from "The Highwayman" with Jim Caviezel, "Chicago," & "Paycheck" with Ben Affleck, Hank finally blows the whistle at the company meeting, only to be outmaneuvered. Francois Yip who also plays with Slater in this year's "Alone in the Dark" plays Janice who helps Hansen take his concerns to the ethics panel after Gallagher is safe. Then we get to the moral relativity of the picture as a U.S. Senator intervenes saying that the bogus deal is an act of patriotism since gas is over $6 a gallon and we need the oil, even if we have to pretend it's not coming from designated terrorist states. The film's moral ambiguity leaves us on a disquieting note. While not explaining why we simply don't press for energy sources other than fossil fuels, it does smack of real-world compromise. Slater does a good job in a film with a timely topic as we scramble for gas here in the Southeast after Hurricane Katrina disrupted the pipelines. Enjoy! September 1, 2005

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