The Hamburglar.

Oleg Kalugin, a man some credit with helping to foil the hard-line coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991—and others, including Vladimir Putin, have dubbed a traitor—did not appear to partake of the catered spread on Wednesday afternoon in the basement meeting room at the Discovery Times Square exhibit space. The occasion was a press luncheon pegged to the launch of SPY: The Secret World of Espionage, a traveling exhibition of Cold War memorabilia, and Major General Kalugin, now a professor with the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies in Alexandria, Virginia, was there to offer support—and perhaps to serve as something of a living relic himself.

Actually, maybe he wolfed down a turkey sandwich when we turned away. We can’t be sure, which is why we are not in the espionage game. But Maj. Gen. Kalugin has good reason to be careful. The former head of foreign counterintelligence for the KGB, he publicly denounced the agency, spoke up against corruption and vilified Mr. Putin as a war criminal over the war in Chechnya.

A compact man with silvery hair, he noted that a former colleague had let it be known that Mr. Kalugin “would have been dead a long time ago” if he’d emigrated to Europe, instead of the states. “There has not been a single case of a political murder by the Soviets or Russians on the territory of the United States, and I would know,” he said, flashing an impish grin.

Mr. Kalugin actually began his espionage career in New York in the late ’50s, pursuing various clandestine activities while employing the cover of a Columbia student, studying journalism on a Fulbright. (James Franco, are you listening?)

He’s now a U.S. citizen, so it’s all good.

Speaking of political murder, Mr. Kalugin played a role in one of the most sensational rub-outs of the Cold War, the killing of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, a journalist for the BBC Radio and Voice of America. Mr. Markov was felled by a ricin-coated micropellet fired from an umbrella gun on London’s Waterloo Bridge. While admitting he’d been privy to the planning of the assassination, Mr. Kalugin was careful to note that the Soviets did not have any operational involvement in the hit but merely provided the Bulgarians “technical advice”—including, of course, the poison and the umbrella itself, which is now on display in the exhibition.

The weapon is part of the voluminous trove of spy memorabilia collected by the show’s organizer, H. Keith Melton. Among his other treasures on view are Robert Hanssen’s Palm Pilot, Aldrich Ames’s coffee cup, and cuckoo-clock camera of the sort that the Stasi placed in hotel rooms throughout East Germany.

Mr. Melton also managed to wrangle the cooperation of the CIA, which lent dozens of items, including a pigeon camera, an “Insectohopter” miniature spy drone shaped like a dragonfly, and the last flag to wave over Checkpoint Charlie.

The Insectohopter

Mr. Melton said the goal of the exhibit was to educate the public about the vital role played by our intelligence services and encourage young people to consider careers as spooks. “It begins with the kids,” he said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the enthusiastic involvement of the Company, the exhibition delivers an appealingly romantic view of tradecraft. There’s no “yellowcake” on display. None of that cocaine trafficked by the Nicaraguan Contras with an assist by Langley. No mention of Curveball, or Valerie Plame or aluminum tubes. No Bay of Pigs. No waterboards.

Perhaps the most precious item is the ice axe that was used to assassinate Leon Trotsky by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader. Mr. Melton obtained it for a princely sum. “Modesty prevents me from discussing it,” he said.

Though he wore a shiny CIA lapel pin at the luncheon, Mr. Melton was never a spy himself. He made his fortune as a McDonald’s owner-operator in South Florida, ultimately amassing 36 restaurants before cashing out a few years ago after a contract dispute with McDonald’s corporate. In a legal complaint filed in that case, Micky D’s accused him of wiretapping a negotiation.

The Observer couldn’t help wondering if Mr. Melton had been putting his gadget collection to personal use.

“I’m too smart to do things like that,” he said, explaining that the court threw out the charge, which had been based on a misunderstanding. “We said we had a ‘record’ of a conversation and they thought that meant we’d taped it, although we made it clear we just took handwritten notes.”

The suit was settled “very amicably,” he added. “I retired as the most successful McDonald’s operator in history.”

SPY: The Secret World of Espionage is now on view at Discovery Times Square.

Mr. Bjørklund, half of the duo that is Norwegian hit-factory Espionage, just bought a $1.7 million loft in the building with his impossibly lovely wife, former model Sunniva.

Mr. Bjørklund clearly knows how to find a winner—besides co-writing Beyoncé's 2007 hit "Irreplaceable," Espionage is also responsible for getting Chris Brown's "With You" and Train's "Hey Soul Sista" horribly, helplessly, impossibly stuck in your head. (They've also collaborated with Stargate on Ne-Yo, Jennifer Hudson and Jordin Sparks hits).

The Bjørklunds are relocating from a rental at Tribeca Pointe, a waterside tower in Battery Park City, so they should feel right at home in Dumbo's most exclusive (ahem, expensive) building. It's been a nice few months for the ClockTower, which as of March can also count Anne Hathaway among its high-profile residents. The listing goes so far as to call Main Street Dumbo's Park Avenue!

The Bjørklund's airy, high-ceilinged new apartment, listed with Halsted brokers Terrence Le Ray and Charles Homet, looks like the perfect nest for a pair of genetically-gifted Norwegians. (The couple bought the apartment for ask from Joseph Schottland and Linda Monia Dini, but the price took a few small price cuts after going on the market in 2009 for $1.9 million).

The two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom loft has all the nouns and adjectives that an artsy loft should: "11-foot ceilings with exposed beams," "oak floors," "flooded with light." There are also customized closets and a kitchen with a white marble island, a built in Miele espresso maker and a Viking range [insert Ikea/Scandinavian joke here].

Another huge bonus—the apartment comes with sound-proofed walls so the neighbors won't be subjected to any unbearably catchy music.

kvelsey@observer.com

Pine and Hardy contemplating why, exactly, they are fighting for Witherspoon.

More secret agents appear in a pharmacologically induced state of general anesthesia called This Means War. A hack called simply McG, who perpetrated on the world such forgettable trash wallows as two idiotic Charlie’s Angels movies and Terminator Salvation, is hardly the professional you want around to monitor the dosage. The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as “the worst movie of the year.” A premature assessment? Maybe. It’s only February. But after This Means War, one thing is certain: The year has nowhere to go but up.

Tuck (Tom Hardy, the tattooed Muscle McGurk from England who surprised everybody in Warrior) and FDR (Chris Pine) are best buds and inseparable partners who throw people off the roofs of buildings, smash up cities and declare war on entire enemy nations. Nothing can come between them, including the CIA database, which they use illegally to research girls. Nothing, that is, until they fall for the same girl, a motor mouth product researcher, whatever that is, played by the once-discriminating but no longer fresh or versatile Reese Witherspoon. Suddenly it’s a fight to the double bed to see which one wears Brut and which one wears patchouli. Using top-secret classified files and video-surveillance equipment at the CIA field office in Los Angeles, they break every law to spy on each other right up to and including in Ms. Witherspoon’s bedroom. One pretends to be a travel agent. The other passes himself off as a ship’s captain. And she’s dumb enough to believe them both. It’s not clear which one she will choose after a night in the Porthault linen, but you get a good idea when she tells her sluttish nymphomaniac girlfriend about Mr. Pine, “Four in one night!” She’s talking orgasms, not tequila shots.

As CIA operatives, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Pine have all the credibility of Abbott and Costello. For two-thirds of the movie, nothing happens to write home about. Then, just when the movie is gasping its final death rattle, the international assassin whose brother was killed on one of their bungled missions in Hong Kong arrives, and the three stars spend the rest of the running time doing just that—running, smashing up the freeway, destroying cars and public property, blowing up trucks and helicopters and … but why go on? If undercover spies for the CIA spend every waking hour of the day and night using government property to act like imbeciles, I shudder to think what Homeland Security will do to protect the country in an emergency. I know this is a desperate farce without a laugh in sight, but the movie is dead on arrival and not even Ms. Witherspoon can save it. It is, however, high time she started thinking about saving herself—and what’s left of her film career.

rreed@observer.com

THIS MEANS WAR

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg

Directed by McG

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy

0/4

Washington looks back menacingly at this poor decision.

Movies about covert CIA operatives make their own clichés, and in a violent and pointless waste of time and money called Safe House, they come in twos, like double vision. This movie wouldn’t be worth the effort even if it were about something, which it isn’t. Correction: It’s about how Denzel Washington is not above trashing his reputation when the salary works, even if the movie doesn’t.

Ryan Reynolds, who remains as critic-resistant as he is camera-ready, plays Matt Weston, a rookie CIA agent in Cape Town assigned to oversee a top-secret safe house where terrorists, mercenaries and guys with funny accents who haven’t shaved since the Berlin Wall collapsed are held for questioning and, presumably, protected by U.S. law. (In Cape Town? The St. Tropez of South Africa? Where the only people questioned are tourists who lose their room keys?) Anyway, that’s what it says in a screenplay by David Guggenheim that can be described only as what’s left after the dog ate the film-school Screenwriting 101 homework. Anyway, after smashing up half of the city with action-flick monotony, the preppie freshman spy finds himself under orders from headquarters in Langley, Va., to guard a master spy called Tobin Frost (Mr. Washington, in high dudgeon and deep doo-doo), who is suspected of betraying his government in heinous ways too vague to explain. Frost was once a great CIA hero who wrote the book on interrogation protocol before he turned rogue. Now everybody is after him. It takes the film’s entire 1-hour, 55-minute running time before you discover what they want him for and why. Meanwhile, the safe house is invaded by mass murderers Weston believes to be assassins, and he has to flee with his prisoner to save both their lives. Much more confusion lies ahead, when the killers turn out to be CIA agents themselves, but I’m getting one step ahead of a movie that is always one step behind.

With Weston trying to make sense of his orders via long-distance cell phones (they get better reception in Cape Town than in East Hampton) and Frost running, punching, machine-gunning, hand-grenading and destroying half the cars, trucks, buildings and innocent pedestrians on the streets, the movie collapses in a noisy farrago of dizzy editing. The woman at The New York Times raved about the sheer beauty of this film, which has left me stupefied. There is nothing beautiful in any single frame of the stomach-churning camerawork, grainy and shaking around in a series of ugly close-ups. Even the car chases, ratcheted up to an ear-splitting decibel level, are shot in close-ups, robbing the people who like this sort of chaos of the simple pleasure of getting off on the kind of cheap carnage that substitutes for narrative. All of which makes it doubly impossible to figure out what the hell is going on. You can write the plot on the flat side of a bobby pin.

Before the CIA can torture Frost into confessing to treason, his costar, in a dedicated effort to do his job, gain seniority and get a raise, drags his charge to a locker in a packed soccer stadium, where he fires into the crowd and causes a public riot, then escapes through a slum maze of collapsible shacks made of corrugated tin. After the CIA big shots (including Sam Shepard, Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson in his first film in years in which you can understand his brogue) arrive in South Africa from Langley faster than it takes the red-eye to L.A., they start firing at each other. What is going on here? Suffice it to say that Frost is not the heel Weston thinks he is. Here comes the cliché about secret files proving criminal activity and corruption within the ranks of the CIA. One leak to the press and it could wreck the American people’s blind and unwavering trust in their own government! In the end, with almost every actor in the cast dead, blown to hamburger and six feet under, it’s up to the rookie to save the CIA from a black eye and change the course of history.

Are they kidding? We’ve seen the CIA vilified as a viper’s nest of felons, liars and mad-dog killers who all betray each other in dozens of other movies, all better and more gripping than Safe House. In fact, we’ve seen scores of other safe-house movies, all superior to Safe House. This time the suspect pool is so old it’s hairy. Directed with a maximum of overrehearsed brutality and a minimum of skill by young Swedish newcomer Daniel Espinosa, the movie is so predictable that you figure it out an hour before the actors do. This is a naive director with so little insight you wonder what comic books he’s been reading. Under his punishing camera lens, everyone looks sallow, anemic and terrible, including the usually alluring Vera Farmiga, who has never looked so haggard. Even GQ coverboy Ryan Reynolds has bags under his eyes as big as walnuts.

All of which makes me sad about Denzel Washington’s disillusioning participation. I forgive him if the money was irresistible enough to pay off a mortgage or put his kids through Harvard, but Safe House is total junk, and he is one of the producers. I guess I respect him too much to call him a junk dealer, but when the shoe fits …

rreed@observer.com

SAFE HOUSE

Running Time 115 minutes

Written by David Guggenheim

Directed by Daniel Espinosa

Starring Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds and Robert Patrick

1/4

Carano. (Claudette Barius/Five Continents Imports, LLC)

Just what we need — another violent comic-book fantasy about another covert government operative (a catch-phrase that describes just about everybody in escapist-action franchise movies from incoherent Tom Cruise Mission Impossible flicks to Jason Bourne cinematic Xeroxes with Matt Damon). This one is called Haywire. The only difference is that this time the battering ram doing all the kickboxing, slicing and killing is a woman, more or less played, since she cannot act, by kung fu expert, karate specialist, martial arts star and Angelina Jolie wannabe Gina Carano. She’s a female boxer who was defeated in 2009 by Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos in the Strikeforce Women’s Championship, whatever that is. The men she beats the crap out of are an all-star bevy of camera-ready hunks baring their pecs in faceless roles to sell tickets. They are wasting their time, but, boy, do we need them. It is doubtful that the box-office flame exuded by Ms. Carano on her own could draw moths.

Haywire makes no sense whatsoever, which should come as no surprise. It’s the latest brainless exercise in self-indulgence from Steven Soderbergh, whose films rarely make any sense anyway. (I liked Erin Brockovitch, but I now think it was a fluke that will never come again.) Any director who wastes valuable time watching female boxing instead of learning how to make better movies has lost me already. In the opening scene, Channing Tatum walks into a roadside diner in upstate New York and smacks the living daylights out of a woman named Mallory Kane, played by Ms. Carano with more muscles than charm. Naturally, she turns the tables and leaves him unconscious, steals a car belonging to a mind-blown young man named Scott (Michael Angarano), and drives away. Screeching and careering through the snow, she relates everything that happened to her as Scott works hard to keep from screaming before he’s excised from the movie and never seen again. Cut to Washington, D.C., where the overexposed Ewan McGregor is instructed by boss Michael Douglas to eliminate the two-fisted Mallory. Flashback even further to Barcelona, where she and Mr. Tatum were once lovers on a hostage-rescue mission, before she discovered she was marked for assassination. In Dublin, while tracking down a Chinese nationalist, she poses as the wife of another secret agent, played with typical out-of-the-shower, tight-towel nakedness by gym-pumped Michael Fassbender, but instead of taking her to bed he tries to take her out. In retaliation, she chokes him with thighs like sandbags during Hurricane Katrina and fires a bullet through his handsome head. Trying to figure out why she’s been betrayed in an interminable series of splat-crack-pow scenes, she turns into a rogue agent and goes viral, throwing herself off rooftops, smashing through plate-glass windows, leaping from one building to another, bouncing off walls and kicking a lot of groins. It all ends up back in the present, at the elegant New Mexico home of her father, a former Marine turned best-selling author, curiously played by the sturdy and dependable Bill Paxton, who is very good, very brief and very much reduced to the status of a walk-on. Surprise! The anonymous killers and thugs show up, and there’s more fighting to come as she demolishes a lot of beautiful furniture and marvelous architecture, heading for one last showdown with one final master criminal (Antonio Banderas, unrecognizable behind a bushy mouse-gray beard). One can only wonder what Mr. Soderbergh paid so many first-cabin alpha males to make fools of themselves in this piece of junk.

The leap-frog settings across two continents are more eloquent than anything in the dumb, sophomoric script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote the screenplay for Mr. Soderbergh’s pretentious and unwatchable Kafka. You realize early that nobody connected with Haywire has any interest in coherent narrative filmmaking. The movie is nothing more than a locker-room joke. Nothing resembling plot, character development or a star-making career move of any kind is anywhere apparent. The whole point of this time-wasting farrago of idiocy is that women can cut, kick, slash, burn, maim and kill just like men—and make bad movies that are just as stupid. Mr. Soderbergh doesn’t even try to guide his unknown, inexperienced leading lady from the fight ring to the acting arena. He just cranks up the camera and lets her punch herself catatonic. Maybe it’s the role she’s playing, but Gina Carano has all the charisma of a Sherman tank.

rreed@observer.com

HAYWIRE

Running Time 93 minutes

Written by Lem Dobbs

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Starring Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor and Michael Fassbender

1/4

Grace and Gere.

At a time when the new Russia is more about gangsters than politicians, along comes a benign thriller that is about as thrilling as last week’s borscht. A group of Russian spies sneak across the U.S. border posing as illegal Mexican immigrants. Soon after, a U.S. senator is murdered in an alley in Washington, D.C, played by Detroit. Richard Gere plays Paul Sheperdson, a retired C.I.A. operative who threw in the towel in 1989 after he brought down a coven of Soviet assassins code-named for the Romans who killed Julius Caesar, and especially the bloodiest and most dangerous killer of them all, a monster named Cassius. Now, after more than 20 years, the feds think Cassius has just arrived masquerading as one of the phony wetbacks and suspect him of assassinating the senator. None of this is ever explained, but Sheperdson’s old boss at the C.I.A. (Martin Sheen) implores him join forces with a rookie F.B.I. agent named Ben Geary (Topher Grace) to track down Cassius. Apparently, when the C.I.A. joins forces with the F.B.I., it’s like dumping a piranha in a water tank with a stingray. Sheperdson hates academics, but Geary, despite his youth (he wasn’t even around when Sheperdson watched the Berlin Wall fall), is an expert on Cassius, even writing his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard on him. It’s hate at first sight, but Sheperdson, who shot and killed Cassius himself in 1989, is intrigued enough to come out of retirement and prove them all wrong. The search begins and a lot of dull action ensues.

Keeping that Julius Caesar cast list going, another Russian assassin named Brutus is interviewed in a prison cell and he too is savagely murdered. This time it is Sheperdson who sends Geary home, fearing for the lives of his wife and two kids. Then we see Sheperdson slit the throat of Brutus, using Cassius’s famous trick of using an invisible wire from his wrist watch like an old James Bond toy. Aha! So maybe while we were waiting for the true identity of Cassius to be revealed, it was really secret agent Sheperdson all along. But there’s more. Was he a double agent? Now that the Russians sit beside us at the U.N., who is he spying for? Why do Sheperdson and Geary both lapse into Russian? Who is the real villain? No spoilers here. Illogical surprises are just beginning. Contrived plot twists, preposterous red herrings and music so loud it drowns out the dialogue all contribute to a film that might have seemed feasible in the first draft to director Michael Brandt, who also wrote the silly script with Derek Haas, but it got mangled in translation. You can’t even say that when all else fails, there is always the acting. Hopelessly miscast as an F.B.I. agent on a dangerous mission, Mr. Grace doesn’t look old enough to shave. And rarely has Mr. Gere walked through any movie with so little energy and so much indifference. I’ve seen more fervor on the face of a man parking a car. It will take double time to make up for The Double.

rreed@observer.com

THE DOUBLE

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas

Directed by Michael Brandt

Starring Odette Annable, Stephen Moyer and Richard Gere

1/4