Profile

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, Profile follows a British journalist (Valene Kane’s Amy Whittaker) as she agrees to write a story about the recruitment of young European women by ISIS and subsequently befriends a charming fighter named Bilel (Shazad Latif). Profile, like Unfriended and Searching before it, unfolds entirely from the perspective of Amy’s computer screen, and there’s little doubt, certainly, that Bekmambetov does an effective job of establishing the affable central character and a handful of periphery figures (including Amy’s skeptical editor and her patient boyfriend) – which ensures that the decidedly implausible bent of the movie’s storyline is, for the most part, easy enough to overlook. (Amy does, for example, manage to meet Latif’s character within minutes of initially setting up her fake Facebook profile.) It’s clear, then, that Profile‘s less-than-engrossing atmosphere is a result of a padded-out, egregiously deliberate midsection revolving almost entirely around the conversations between Amy and Bilel, with the rather static vibe compounded by a curiously uncomplicated narrative that contains little in the way of surprises or unexpected plot twists. By the time the anticlimactic and astonishingly abrupt conclusion rolls around, Profile’s confirmed its place as a just-watchable-enough endeavor that’s hardly in the same league as its similarly-themed predecessors.

**1/2 out of ****