How entertaining? ★☆☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 4 May 2015
This article is a review of SPOOKS: THE GREATER GOOD. |
“It comes down to who can tell the best lie longest,” Harry Pearce (Peter Firth)
2015 is the year of the espionage movie. We’ve already had the ridiculously fun KINGSMAN, and upcoming we have behemoths SPECTRE and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION. Alongside those, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.LE. and comedy SPY join the resurgence in the genre. Brit TV show, ‘Spooks’, gets the big screen treatment to dire, budget effect. Every scene reeks of money running out. Po-faced acting and leaden dialogue make a would-be thriller a chore.
2015 is the year of the espionage movie. We’ve already had the ridiculously fun KINGSMAN, and upcoming we have behemoths SPECTRE and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION. Alongside those, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.LE. and comedy SPY join the resurgence in the genre. Brit TV show, ‘Spooks’, gets the big screen treatment to dire, budget effect. Every scene reeks of money running out. Po-faced acting and leaden dialogue make a would-be thriller a chore.
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Opening on a traffic jam, I kid you not, an unintentional figurative representative for the entire movie, a “tier 2 C.I.A. target” (dialogue out of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY this is not) is in UK security custody. On route to who knows where, for what purpose, Qasim (Elyes Gabel) is meant to be under armed guard; yet when motorcycle assailants rock up with machine guns the protectors fold boringly, under orders from operational boss Harry Pearce. An embarrassment for MI5, somehow this snafu gets into the press, with journalistic observation that the C.I.A. might take over Britain’s security. Eh? The UK losing its national spy sovereignty?! Ludicrous stakes are dumped into the ring early.
Obviously an inside job, yawn-inducing conspiracy is positioned centrally. Wait till you get to secret agents crumbling under the barest of interrogations. There is talk of departmental revenue cuts. More cinematic meta. That MI5 appear to be using QWERTY keyboard-style mobile phones show how f*cked they really are. Clandestine moves involve pushing envelopes under doors (cutting edge skulduggery perhaps back in the era of the just invented door).
Harry is let go and then fakes his own death. The powers that be then recruit his old protégé, Will Holloway (Kit Harington), randomly introduced jumping through a window pursued in Moscow. Of course, the chase ends before it has really started. Why bother get the audience’s heart racing? When the occasional fisticuffs do occur, the editing and choreography are respectively nonsensical and banal. Not wanting to be mean, Kit Harington is a one-note actor, equivalent to Kristen Stewart at her worst, channelling a constant morose sulkiness. (Maybe à la Ms Stewart in CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA he will one day prove to be adept.)
A lean manhunt movie, for Qasim, was on the cards, but as with FAST & FURIOUS 7 a simple plot is unnecessarily convoluted with side missions; reminding of a video game, or TV show 24 at its most annoyingly dragged out. Hardly globetrotting, the majority of the action is London-centred, where the historical, cultural metropolis is not utilised. Even English roses (Jennifer Ehle, Tuppence Middleton) being steely, playing against the wallflower cliché, aren’t enough to compensate for inconsequential filmmaking.
Trying to have an intriguing moral compass falls flat. A more accurate title: SPOOKS: FINESSE VACUUM.
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