Harry soon starts educating Osnard about the local situation, saying to him, "Welcome to Panama -- a Casablanca without heroes." The tailor tells the spy that the poor call high-rise luxury apartment buildings "cocaine towers" because of the source of their financing and banks "launderettes" because they launder so much drug money. Also, Osnard is given a briefing at the British Embassy where a picture of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is shown, and the briefer states, "It was Dr. Frankenstein, George Bush, who created this monster when he was head of the CIA." The briefer then goes on to say that later when Noriega’s drug running and brutality got to be too much, President George Bush sent in American troops to take him out. When Harry takes Osnard to an exclusive club whose members are Panama’s thirty ruling families, the tailor tells the spy why Noriega’s removal had little effect on the country’s corruption: "They got Ali Baba, but they missed the forty thieves."

Although Harry is privy to lots of gossip around Panama, he knows very little that is of interest to the intelligence community. But Harry has been making up stories all his life, and it’s not long before he’s feeding Osnard tales of arms shipments and shady deals involving the Panama Canal. The meetings between Osnard and Harry are handled in imaginative ways in the film, including having the two men sit on a vibrating bed in a brothel watching sex on closed-circuit TV and showing them conversing in a gay bar while dancing with each other to "Let’s Face the Music and Dance."

Osnard doesn’t really believe Harry’s outrageous stories, but he finds it convenient to pass them along to his superiors anyway. The movie then goes on to show that Harry’s lies eventually reach the top levels of American government, where they are believed, leading to some serious consequences. However, the film pulls away rather quickly from explicitly showing these consequences, preferring instead to pursue the yarn in terms of the immediate fates of its two main characters.

Pierce Brosnan’s Andy Osnard is thoroughly despicable, and this is reinforced visually when he slugs a woman hard as a result of a situation that he has provoked. But the character Osnard, like the actor who portrays him, exudes roguish charm. One of the nicely handled sequences in the movie shows Osnard and a sexy coworker (Catherine McCormack) lunching at an elegant Canal-side cafe intercut with scenes showing them having steamy sex, all set to the sounds of a hot Panamanian musical group. I find it impossible to argue against the notion that most women will be sexually attracted to a man who looks and acts like Pierce Brosnan, no matter how wicked he may be.

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