Wasp Network review – serviceable spy thriller lacks sting

The biggest problem with Olivier Assayas's new film Wasp Network is that it doesn't feel like an Olivier Assayas film. The French auteur, whose career has resulted in some of the most acclaimed movies of the century so far, including Summer Hours and Personal Shopper, is renowned for his playful, clever meditations on art, life, and death. But this film – based on a true story of five Cuban spies – feels at odds with a director who's usually one step ahead of you. Assayas has, for lack of a better word, gone “mainstream.”

Our story takes place in the early 90s at a time when a surge of Cuban defectors were fleeing the country, either to start afresh in the USA or to fight the regime from afar. It's in this mould that that we find Rene (Edgar Ramirez), who wakes up one day, says goodbye to his wife (Penelope Cruz), steals a plane, and flies to Miami. In his home country, he's declared a traitor. Quickly enough, Rene is enlisted into an anti-Castro group – one of many organisations aiding fellow defectors by flying planes and dropping supplies.

Meanwhile, a secondary plot finds Cuban movie star Juan Pablo Rogue, played by Narcos' Wagner Moura, also defecting. He swims to Guantanamo Bay, is treated to a McDonald's by the agents there, and winds up marrying the beautiful Ana Margarita (Ana de Armas, who starred alongside Moura in another Netflix film, Sergio, earlier this year) in a wedding sequence that strains for Godfather-like grandeur. But both men, it turns out, are hiding secrets and masked agendas; nothing here is quite as it seems.

This territory, admittedly, isn't new to Assayas. His five-and-half-hour-long biopic, Carlos, was politically minded and traced the life and times of Carlos the Jackal – though where that film felt like a perfect compromise of mainstream appeal working under its director's trademark sensibilities, Wasp Network seems alternately dumbed down, lost, compromised, and tampered with. As the film unravels, its shifting timeline makes it difficult to understand what's going on, and there are stylish touches – a voiceover, which occurs an hour in – that feel like the fallbacks of a lesser director.

The usually elegant, clever meditations we've come to expect are nowhere to be seen; this film mostly seems cobbled together at random, with no clear sense of how to communicate a story with such scope (and we know he can do it, because Carlos), touching on immigration, CIA involvement, and the 1997 Cuban hotel bombings. As a result, Wasp Network never quite finds the right groove or an overall cohesion, though there are moments when you can glimpse what this might have been with a little more care and attention – or a three-hour runtime.

Wasp Network is at best when it focuses on the personal lives of those involved – how political actions effect the families and the ones we love. In these interactions, which give way to the film's most interesting scenes, you sense what was perhaps the director's intent, though the performances themselves lack detail. The men here – including a late-stage appearance from Gael García Bernal – are stoic and mostly interchangeable. The women fare far better: Penelope Cruz gives a more layered and interesting turn as an abandoned mother working to provide for her child. And Ana de Armas brings sultry charm and bravado to an underwritten part.

Why Netflix, though? Perhaps in their acquisition of Wasp Network, the streaming giant hoped the blend of exotic locales, Cuban-period setting, and the casting of Moura would lure in the same audience of their hugely successful TV show Narcos. But Wasp Network never offers those kind of thrills because it never feels truly dangerous. When the movie ends, suddenly, it's like watching Assayas himself throwing his hands up and declaring the whole thing to be a write-off.

All this might make Wasp Network sound like a painful experience to sit through. It isn't. It's fine. It's just odd for a filmmaker to go from a picture as singular as Personal Shopper, which is so unique and strange and unforgettable, to something that feels like basically anyone could be behind the camera. Let's hope the muted reception to this tale of Cuban spies is enough to persuade him to leave the territory for a while. Because the only real defector here is Assayas, who has left his own standards behind.

Wasp Network is now streaming on Netflix.