The Company

by Sean Burns

Chris O’Donnell sure ain’t Matt Damon.

To be honest, I was kind of hoping we were rid of O’Donnell, who hasn’t headlined a project in years. But the perennially fresh-faced Boston College grad must’ve noticed what wonders the espionage genre has been working lately for that other handsomely nondescript fella from Beantown. He thus finds himself headlining The Company, a TNT miniseries about the disturbingly Yale-centric history of the CIA that mines a lot of the same material Damon already tackled in The Good Shepherd. (Michael Keaton even co-stars as James Angelton, the inspiration for Matty’s character in that 2006 Robert De Niro-directed dud.)

The big surprise is that The Company is even longer and duller than The Good Shepherd, which is no mean feat.

Adapted from a novel by Robert Littell, Company sends three fictional characters bouncing Forrest Gump-style through every major event in Cold War history. College buddies O’Donnell, Alessandro Nivola and Rory Cochrane find themselves recruited for all sorts of secret-coded intelligence skullduggery, except Russian Rory is on the other side. Bland performances from the leads are countered by hambone supporting turns from Alfred Molina as a constantly soused secret agent, and Keaton’s nutzoid work as the legendary Angelton.

Peering out through giant eyeglasses and chain-smoking his way through scenes while delivering all his lines in a reedy, perverse whimper, the former Batman is affected and homuncular even before he gets stuck delivering arcane monologues about orchids. Ken Nolan’s lumpy telepic is prone to obvious metaphors, as Molina welcomes O’Donnell into the CIA’s “hall of mirrors” a scant half-hour before our star finds himself dodging KGB tails in—you guessed it—a carnival’s hall of mirrors.

TNT went all out for this one, even running the mini’s introductory hour without commercial interruptions, and instead intermittently plastering the bottom half of the screen with distracting logos for Quiznos and Lincoln Mercury. But a big cable-movie budget is nonetheless a cable-movie budget, and given the story’s sprawling canvas, it’s no wonder director Mikael Salomon sticks mainly with cramped medium shots. Every time he goes a little wider, the curiously shiny and weirdly depopulated soundstages call attention to themselves.

You’re better off renting The Good Shepherd. At least that one has Matt Damon.