F3EA

F3EA is a fast paced mystery thriller. The premise is that a therapist and his "Patient", an unnamed former sailor turned intelligence case officer known only as the Patient, are playing mind games with each other recounting the Patient's time in the field in the service of an unnamed United States Intelligence agency. The movie works as a roller coaster ride through active intelligence operations, memories and brief flashbacks as the Patient makes his case for why he should be allowed to remain in the field. The primary motivation for the entire film is that the therapist is trying to determine if the Patient has gone rogue. The title comes from the intelligence language in Find-Fix-Finish-Eliminate-Assess though some of the letters are sometimes said to stand for other related words. We begin in an unnamed government facility with the Patient speaking to a mental health professional in a cat-and-mouse dialogue that is antagonistic from the jump. The Patient, also unnamed for most of the story, is recounting a riot at a secret prison in Yemen and a failed undercover operation to find a specific terror plot's financing and ring leader. The Patient is discovered mid-operation but has saved the life of the ring leader who spares the agent's life and leaves him stranded in a deserted village in the mountains of an unknown country. From here, we see the Patient considering retirement and a teaching position when the same terrorist organization threatens his family. We get a glimpse at his wife and daughter and the events that triggered his circuitous route to being accused of going "rogue" and conducting field operations related to a joint task force on his own. He meets a "ghost" from his time in Yemen in Max, an operator whom he thought dead and thought he was responsible for Max's death. Max, now working undercover with a different agency attempts to help the Patient unravel the danger to his family but ultimately ends up working against the Patient because of his own agency's orders. The Patient steals from Max and continues his activities, calling a meeting in Cuba with a Chinese Government agent and a representative of a large organized crime group. Along the way, he meets a woman he eventually marries on a whim and is tracked down by the original terrorist organization in an attempt on his life. When he discovers that his new "wife" is already married to a known terror suspect, he flees, again, to a remote part of the world to find an AWOL American agent who may have answers to the organizations location. There he participates in a rescue attempt by the AWOL agent with a popular female Omani Lawmaker's assistance. A mistake he makes along the way results in the capture of a team of Danish special forces operators in Yemen and he returns there to right the error but finds himself hunted by Max and his team through the streets. A fateful choice to hide on the roof of a small shop in a very simple evasion of the US forces results in the death of a shopkeeper and his teenaged son and clarifies why the Patient is in custody facing a psychological evaluation to begin with. The action based drama-thriller comes to a halt back in the therapist's office during the exam and the therapist reveals that the exam is not real and the Patient has been designated a threat to national security in America and that he is actually, in spite of his earliest assurances, there to determine if the Patient needed to be eliminated. His supervisors, watching the Patient's exam behind mirrored glass and on surveillance cameras have decided he is to be eliminated. The story ends with the entire room and facility being packed up and moved around the body of the Patient, killed by the Therapist. The movie proper ends with questions as to whether or not the Patient was truly dead or had he survived the assassination attempt. BOURNE meets ANALYZE THIS with a hint of HITMAN'S BODYGUARD for good measure.