Legal ethics go by the board as a pair of British barristers try to defend an accused terrorist bomber in “Closed Circuit,’’ a credulity-straining thriller featuring a few good paranoid moments — and, perhaps most important, Rebecca Hall running in high heels.
Hall has been appointed by the judge as a special advocate who will have access to classified documents not available to the regular defense attorney for a suspect accused of causing hundreds of deaths in London. It’s up to her to argue before the judge in closed session for the release of information in open court.
The suspect’s regular court-appointed lawyer has suddenly died before the trial began — supposedly by his own hand — and his colleague Eric Bana has been handed the assignment. Which kind of complicates things: He was involved with Hall in an affair that ended with his own messy divorce.
For the film to work, we’re supposed to believe that these two high-profile lawyers would risk disbarment by deciding together to lie to the judge by concealing their relationship — and that MI5, which is working very closely with the prosecution, is supposedly blissfully unaware of this blatant conflict of interest.
Not only do Bana and Hall deceive the judge and the prosecution, they illegally collaborate on investigating the case — and Hall shares classified information with Bana without the judge’s permission.
The barristers’ shaky rationale is that the government is covering up the suspect’s own relationship with MI5 to avoid a scandal, but then why did they put him on trial in the first place? Especially when it becomes clear that MI5 is quite willing to kill people to keep this secret?
To fully enjoy “Closed Circuit,’’ you need to put all those nagging questions out of your mind and enjoy the two attractive leads, who realize that their own lives are in danger unless they agree to participate in the cover-up.
Director John Crowley (“Boy A’’) stages some fine chases as our protagonists attempt to evade menacing MI5 operative Riz Ahmed. The exposition-heavy script by Steven Knight (“Eastern Promises’’) gives Ahmed a juicier role than either Jim Broadbent (as the attorney general) or Ciaran Hinds (as Bana’s colleague), fine actors who have disappointingly little to do.
“Closed Circuit,’’ which oddly plays down the romantic chemistry between its leads, works its way to a fairly predictable, if not particularly believable, conclusion. On paper, this sounds like relatively challenging fare for late August — but the execution makes it strictly a rental title.