Plotholes galore
[SPOLIERS ALERT!}
Just saw The Double again on cable and I have to say, it was interesting enough but the gaping holes in the plot just makes one wonder if a script editor was ever involved in the production at all.
The way I see it, since Cassius was a master assassin whose best asset was his anonymity, it makes sense that Brutus never knew who his trainer in Moscow was. I can buy that Cassius' handler would punish him for his indiscretion (his "mistake", as he was told over the phone by his handler) in starting a family in Geneva by ordering his wife and child to be killed. But why not eliminate Cassius right away without his even knowing it? After all, his deception meant he could never be trusted again, especially in a paranoid climate like the Cold War (even the tail end of it in 1988). And to tell Cassius that his family has been slaughtered, what did Moscow think he would do, roll over and meekly report back to Mother Russia? Risk losing him to the Americans if Cassius were to defect in revenge? And when Cassius starts going rogue right after that and begins killing off Russian spies and agents and the 'Cassius 7' in retaliation, no one at his agency in Moscow knows who he is? I mean, I can accept that the Russians wouldn't let Western intelligence know who Cassius was, but to let him merrily kill off so many Russian assets in those couple of years without being able to stop him, even after Cassius stopped his revenge spree believing he had eliminated Brutus, why did they wait over 20 years before doing anything about it? I mean, they obviously knew Cassius' cover as CIA operative Shepherdson, having planted him there in the first place. They could have easily gotten to him at any time, before and after retirement.
I don't buy that the Russians didn't know who Cassius or what his cover was all this time; I mean, they had been giving him missions which he had been successfully carrying out all this while before his "mistake", and he had been reporting to his handler like clockwork.
Also Brutus' escape from the hospital (seriously, they send a high-risk prisoner not to the prison infirmary but to an outside hospital with only one or two guards?) would surely have alerted joint FBI-CIA task force far, far earlier, the moment he was sent to the hospital and not hours later after his body was found in the hospital car park.
And the so-called second twist at the end about the revelation that Geary was a Russian sleeper agent, all this suggesting that the Russians didn't know who Cassius was, and taking the trouble to groom and plant Geary to be eventually picked to work in the FBI just so he could eventually work his way up through the ranks to flush out Cassius 20-odd years later. All this trouble by Moscow in the belief that Cassius had settled in the US and not anywhere else in the world? Really?
I'm also fuzzy about Bozlovski's presence in the US with his hit team. So they weren't there to eliminate Cassius but to commit terrorism in the US (evidenced by the discovery of the weapons at the port)? So what happened to the rest of the team, like "the man in the cheap Russian coat"? And after Cassius tells Bozlovski that he is Cassius, shoots, but fails to kill him, Bozlovski doesn't alert his handlers in Russia to Cassius' US identity right away?
And what happens to Geary's nerdy FBI colleague? Having involved him in proving that Shepherdson is Cassius, and conveniently convincing the FBI and CIA that Bozlovski is Cassius, surely Oliver is the loose end that Geary must eliminate right away.
Instead, the film ends with Geary returning to his family, choosing to stay in the US. But ok, fair enough, I can buy that he intends to defy his Russian agency with the excuse that now that he has been invited to join the CIA, his remaining in the US would be more useful. But Oliver knows too much and, seeing how he's constantly going on about wanting to get noticed and get ahead in the Bureau, he will surely be the first to raise the alarm on Geary's theory that Shepherdson is Cassius.
I just wish the film's story and plotting had been a lot, lot more tighter. It would undoubtedly had fared much better at the box office. The bad plotting, lazy writing, and the infamous trailer for the film, killed the film.
PS. With reference to the "was it an error or an indirect joke" in relation to Natalie telling Shepherdson, "Welcome to our commode" instead of "abode", I'm siding with the latter theory that it was a deliberate joke.