
This is the film that you almost think does the trick, but doesn't quite! There are a whole lot of specious and rather spurious attempts to amp it up into a kind of greater resonance than arguably the particular story has. I mean, for instance, it's plugged into the Watergate Zeitgeist in order to give an extra charge of kind of epochal paranoia because we're in the 70s. And there's a whole lot of stuff with sort of secret agents and so on, which doesn’t quite add up. The strength is Richard Gere's performance.
if something 'does the trick', it has the necessary or desired effect 達到目的
'to amp it up' – to amplify something, to make something more exciting and meaningful than it really is 夸張,夸大
the Zeitgeist - the ideas of a particular time and place 時代精神,時代思潮
to add up – to make sense 說的通