Aidan Quinn on target as lead in 'The Assignment'

By Nicolas Colombant

JAKARTA (JP): Even though Carlos, alias "the Jackal", now stands trial in France for the murder of two French agents and an informer, we will never know the true measures taken by the intelligence community to capture him.

Carlos -- who has been blamed for the deaths of at least 83 people -- was on the run for more than 20 years, spilling blood in the name of the extremists who hired him.

While he proved a very difficult target for antiterrorist agents in pursuit of him, the true nature of this fugitive has proved even more elusive for the makers of a movie.

The Assignment opens in 1974 with Carlos, played by Aidan Quinn, throwing a grenade into the middle of a crowded Parisian cafe, a scene based on a real incident. From there on, all reality vanishes and the imagination of the young Canadian filmmaker Christian Duguay takes over.

The Paris bombing happens under the very nose of CIA agent Jack Shaw/Henry Fields (Donald Sutherland, another Canadian) who finds this humiliating, and who now has a score to settle with Carlos.

Shaw finds his chance a decade later when a dead-ringer for the phantom killer is picked up on the streets of Jerusalem.

Annibal Ramirez (also played by Aidan Quinn) is a Cuban- American navy officer who comes ashore to take pictures and finds himself getting chased down by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence partner of the CIA.

Eventually Ramirez finds himself being interrogated by a top Mossad agent, Amos, who is played unconvincingly by a bald Ben Kingsley.

In a case of mistaken identity, Amos believes that Ramirez is Carlos, while the squeaky-clean Ramirez thinks Amos is nuts.

So it comes as no surprise when we all find out that Carlos is still AWOL and that Ramirez is planning to sue all of Israel.

This does, however, enliven the taste buds of Shaw, a regular SOB, who comes up with a plan that defies logic but, after all, was it not the CIA that tried to blow up Fidel Castro with a fake cigar?

The plan goes like this: Ramirez will go undercover as Carlos, in order to get the KGB to assassinate the real Carlos. Sounds as easy as one, two, three.

But the movie unfolds slowly and methodically, with Ramirez first being taken to an icy dungeon somewhere near Montreal, where he eats porridge and is forced to do sit-ups off a 50-foot balcony while Amos blows cigar smoke in his face.

In scenes that make you think Quinn is auditioning for a James Bond movie, he plays paint ball in a cemetery and avoids darting snowmobiles. He also learns how to case a room in five seconds and displays a unique talent for identifying cigarette stubs in dust bins.

The training teaches him to act and feel like Carlos, helping him to find the evil inside the good guy he is.

Ramirez is even taught how to make love like Carlos, something hard to come to terms with considering the good family man he is, with a beautiful wife and children who should not be forgotten.

At one point, Ramirez is given LSD and this is when he manages to work up his demons and venture deep into the abyss of Carlos' soul.

In the movie's best scene, the young director Duguay weaves some magic, using a high-tech motion control camera to reach inside the divided mind of a man posing as a killer.

After this preparation, the movie is off and running.

It is either Quinn with his baby-blue eyes as the good guy turned brute or, with brown contact lenses, as the simply rotten bad seed, chasing women, agents and himself, from Paris to St. Martin to Libya and finally to East Berlin, where Quinn ends up strangling Quinn. Face/Off anyone?

Hollywood has never found a lead role for Aidan Quinn -- last seen in these parts in Legends of the Fall -- but the Canadian producers gave him quite a workout.

As the heavy-handed Carlos, he rises to the occasion as the tortured Ramirez who can never return to what he once was.

This is essentially, a low-budget Canadian film, which may explain its subdued tone, its lack of obsession with political correctness and why so much time is spent away from the action.

It actually feels like an old-fashioned international espionage flick, where the first and third acts are more important than the suspense itself.