Viper Club

Susan Sarandon headlines this trudging and bleary-eyed drama as Helen Sterling, an emergency room nurse fighting to free her independent journalist son Sam (Matt Bomer), who is being held captive overseas by Islamic terrorists. When Helen finds that the CIA and FBI are reluctant to act (or even talk to each other), she seeks the help of an underground network called the Viper Club, thrusting her into a world of secret fundraising and illicit money laundering. Meanwhile at the hospital, Helen mentors a young Iranian doctor and counsels a distraught mother waiting for her daughter to wake from a coma. An ostensibly fictional story inspired by real-life events and people, most notably slain American journalist James Foley and his mother, director Maryam Keshavarz’s Viper Club is incredibly unfocused and strangely impersonal, relying almost entirely on hackneyed visions, dreams and flashbacks to forge any kind of emotional connection with the audience.