The Ghost

Ewan McGregor is a ghost writer, i.e. a bloke who co-writes celebrity
autobiographies in order to render them semi-readable. His agent phones him to
try and get him to do a gig where the previous guy doing it just washed up dead
on a beach. Obviously, he's not keen, but silly sums of money are discussed.
The subject of the autobiography is Adam Lang, who *isn't* based on Tony Blair,
oh no, honest guv. He must be based on some other UK Prime Minister who
authorised an illegal war in Iraq.

So, he rolls up to some horrifically ugly modernist house on a remote island in
the US, where he's going to have to do the work for reasons of "this document
doesn't leave this room." There he meets Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan and his
wife played by Olivia Williams. So, regardless of however much crap about
illegal wars and rendition gets bandied about, the Blairs are going to have to
be feeling pretty flattered by now. Especially Cherie, she's come out if the
deal particularly well.

So, Ewan does a frankly pretty desultory and half-hearted bit of poking around,
and even this much reveals that there's something dodgy about Brosnan's
university years, which his predecessor was poking at immediately before
mysteriously falling off a car ferry and washing up on a beach exactly where he
couldn't possibly have done if he'd fallen off a car ferry. Ewan continues to
poke at the same stuff, so it should come as no surprise to you, me or him that
he's very soon on the run for his life. Fortunately for him, he has the new BMW
X5 which, with the amount of screen time it gets, ought to be getting at least
third billing over Olivia Williams. Given the satnav, I think it even gets more
lines than her.

Anyway, long story short, Brosnan has secrets that a mysterious cartel want
covered up, but which they've done so little work to actually do so, that
anyone with five minutes to spare and access to Google could put it together.
Given how close to the surface it is, in fact, it's implausible that it wasn't
already a well established internet conspiracy theory.

Anyway, it all wraps up neatly, and you totter off into the night, not
unentertained, but with a slight feeling that with the names involved
(author Robert Harris, director Roman Polanski), that you really ought to have
seen something rather more momentous than a pretty average conspiracy thriller.