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Parents' Guide to

Damascus Cover

By Michael Ordona, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

1989-set spy thriller has violence and sex.

Movie R 2018 93 minutes
Damascus Cover Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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What's the Story?

DAMASCUS COVER -- based on the same-named novel by Howard Kaplan -- follows a Mossad operative named Ari Ben-Zion (aka Hans Hoffmann, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who's on a mission to extract a chemical-weapons scientist from 1989 Syria. Posing as a German businessman, Ben-Zion encounters a beautiful photographer named Kim (Olivia Thirlby), expatriate Nazis (led by Jürgen Prochnow), the head of Syrian intelligence, and -- of course -- several plot twists.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

Apart from its focus on Rhys Meyers' character, this spy-themed potboiler falls into familiar patterns of betrayals and captures, which ends up lowering the stakes. And the plot is sometimes hard to follow, which doesn't help. Damascus Cover isn't especially memorable, but it does benefit from strong performances by the two leads. Rhys Meyers does some of his best work to date; he's convincingly intense as a Mossad agent struggling with a personal tragedy. Thirlby, while underused, is layered and beguiling enough to make us understand how Ben-Zion could be distracted from his job. John Hurt appears briefly in one of his final film roles.

For some reason, the action is shifted from the 1977 setting of Kaplan's novel to 1989, but the film doesn't particularly feel like a period piece in any case. Kaplan's book has been praised for its atmospheric, political knowledge of Syria, but that's not as evident here. The movie's emphasis on the spy as a person helps distinguish it from the espionage-movie pack, but it's not exactly suspenseful. Bottom line? You could do worse than Damascus Cover. But you could also do better.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about spy movies. What do they tend to have in common? How does Damascus Cover stack up? What's different or the same about it, compared to what you expected?

  • How would you describe the movie's violence? Is it realistic? Do all kinds of media violence have the same impact?

  • Is the movie's historical context (the fall of the Berlin Wall) important? Why or why not?

  • Did you find the final twist believable and/or interesting?

Movie Details

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