ROGUE AGENT: When Cat Becomes Mouse

The debut feature film from directing duo Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, Rogue Agent isn’t your average spy movie⁠—mostly because the central character is not your average spy. In fact, he’s not a spy at all, but a con man claiming to be a member of MI5 in order to extort large sums of money from unsuspecting victims. Starring James Norton as the con man and Gemma Arterton as the woman who falls for him, then decides to take him down, Rogue Agent has a wonderfully outrageous truth-is-stranger-than-fiction premise but doesn’t make the most of it, forcing its two lead actors to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping the audience engaged.

Secrets and Lies

It’s the early 2000s. Alice Archer (Arterton) is a successful litigation attorney at a high-powered law firm. Used to being the only woman⁠—and a beautiful one at that⁠—surrounded by men who don’t take her as seriously as they should, she is not someone who is easily fooled. It would take a real expert con man to worm his way into her affections and pull the wool over her eyes⁠—but that is exactly what Robert Freegard (Norton), whom she meets while walking by the luxury car dealership where he works, is.

Since the early 1990s, when MI5 started recruiting freelance spies to keep track of suspected members of the IRA, Freegard has posed as a secret agent, conning men and women (but especially women) into embarking on supposed secret missions that usually involve the targets obtaining large sums of money from their families before cutting off all ties. In fact, Sophie (Marisa Abela), who Freegard targeted while she was still in college, is still obeying Freegard’s every order in the hope that she’ll finally be accepted into the elite field agent training program he has told her she’s a candidate for.

In the meantime, Archer falls hard and fast for Freegard and even agrees to go into business with him leasing luxury cars to corporate clients. Naturally, by the time she realizes that Freegard is not who he says he is, he’s made off with a large sum of her money and shattered her heart into smithereens. But Archer isn’t the kind of woman to sit and mourn her misfortunes; as she tells Freegard in one of her final phone calls to him, “You haven’t broken me.”

Dirty Rotten Scoundrel

Rogue Agent might be based on a true story⁠—an unpublished ten-year-old article called “Chasing Agent Freegard” by Michael Bronner, to be exact⁠—but the plot frequently feels too outrageous to be believable. It’s just hard to wrap one’s mind around the fact that someone was able to masquerade as a secret agent, claiming to be acting on behalf of the UK government while effectively kidnapping and brainwashing his victims, for years without getting himself into legal trouble.

When Archer goes to the police, they tell her that Freegard is just too good; an unrepentant psychopath and a clever one to boot, he finds loopholes and other ways of skating smoothly past any real allegations of wrongdoing. And of course, he’s also a massive charmer, handsome and charismatic to an almost unfathomable degree. By all accounts, those are the main ways he was able to get away with it for so long⁠—that and convincing his victims not to cooperate with the police as they were, according to him, actually double agents or fellow members of MI5 testing their loyalty.

Still, one feels as though there is something missing from Rogue Agent, something that could have made the story as wickedly compelling as Freegard apparently was (and likely still is⁠—he’s currently out of prison and apparently conning new women). Instead, it devolves into paint-by-numbers spy shenanigans that look and feel like something from basic cable: cheap, unconvincing, and occasionally laughable. Many of the supporting performances feel amateurish at best, which doesn’t help; if the actors don’t believe what they’re talking about, how can the audience? Even the title is disappointingly bland and could belong to any number of straight-to-streaming spy thrillers that are too easily forgotten as soon as the closing credits roll.

The main assets of Rogue Agent are the two talented leads. As Archer⁠—a career-woman character, constantly chugging red wine and puffing on cigarettes, who borders on cliche⁠—Arterton is smart, sexy, and incredibly sympathetic. When Freegard breaks her heart, she’ll stop at nothing to prove to him that she’s not some sad little girl who will spend the rest of her life crying about what could have been. A perfect match for him when it comes to being driven to complete a mission at all costs, one cannot help but wonder if Freegard is actually telling the truth when he claims that Archer is the only woman he ever truly loved. After all, she’s the only one in the entire film whose self-assurance seems to rival his.

As Freegard, Norton’s undeniably handsome but not entirely trustworthy face is put to optimal use. In seducing Archer and the other women we see him con throughout the film, he allows just enough of Freegard’s inner darkness to bubble to the surface, lending a subtle air of menace to their meet-cutes that will no doubt make you think twice the next time you’re approached by a charming man you don’t know. As the film progresses and we see Freegard commit increasingly grotesque, desperate acts⁠—including depriving a woman of her antidepressants until she’s able to get a loan of $80,000 from her parents⁠—the darkness gradually becomes the dominant trait, and you’ll wonder why anyone could have ever fallen for him in the first place. Needless to say, it’s all too easy to root for Archer and her allies to take him down, and all the more frustrating to realize that in real life, he’s still out there, and probably hasn’t stopped.

Conclusion:

While one cannot deny the simple joys of watching two actors as nimble and attractive as Arterton and Norton play cat and mouse, Rogue Agent never quite lives up to its extraordinary premise. But I’d love to read the article that inspired it.

What do you think? What are your favorite movies about con men? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Rogue Agent is released in theaters and on AMC+ in the U.S. on August 12, 2022. It is currently available for streaming on Netflix in the UK. You can find more international release dates here.

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