Beirut opens in theaters tonight.
A perfectly serviceable airport novel of a movie, Beirut has enough espionage-like twists to keep you occupied for 109 minutes and mostly distracted from the fact its best parts never fully develop. It’s also kind of xenophobic and white savior-y, but those are almost genre requirements for this sort of thing; either you’ve made your peace with that or you haven’t.
Jon Hamm plays Mason Skiles, a handsome ace negotiator with a dead wife and a drinking problem that everyone talks about but that never seems to affect his job performance. On the eve of the 1982 Israeli invasion, Skiles is in Beirut to negotiate a hostage transfer between the CIA and the PLO.