John Le Carre is on a roll. Hot on the heels of the well-received TV adaptation of THE NIGHT MANAGER comes this cinema version of another of his novels, also filmed with a hefty budget, I imagine: location shoots in Morocco and Bern as well as Paris and London. The storyline bears some similarities to THE NIGHT MANAGER: outsiders accidentally drawn into the world of espionage and treachery. The movie seems to have sneaked in under the radar: I wonder why the producers didn't cash in more blatantly on MANAGER's success.
Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris play a British poetry professor and his wife who befriend a Russian millionaire they meet on holiday. He asks the professor to approach MI5 with his offer to defect to Britain with some uncomfortable information about members of the Establishment who are helping a mafia bank set up a laundering branch in London; in return he wants his family to be offered protection in the West.
Stellan Skarsgard plays the rude crude oligarch in a volume and style borrowed from Brian Blessed. Damian Lewis affects an unconvincing Belgravia accent as the one decent spymaster fighting the recalcitrance and lack of principles of his Whitehall superiors, a part which perhaps too obviously recycles Olivia Colman's in THE NIGHT MANAGER. There's not enough meat on Naomie Harris's role, but Ewan McGregor makes a more persuasive Ordinary Joe than MANAGER's Tom Hiddleston, who seemed a bit bland and too posh – I hope he won't be the next 007.
Perhaps OUR KIND OF TRAITOR has come too close on the heels of THE NIGHT MANAGER, making the similarities over-conspicuous. TRAITOR has a little less drama but a lot more heart. Le Carre is very good at endings – remember THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD? – and this one is particularly finely judged. This is up there with the best of his movies.
Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris play a British poetry professor and his wife who befriend a Russian millionaire they meet on holiday. He asks the professor to approach MI5 with his offer to defect to Britain with some uncomfortable information about members of the Establishment who are helping a mafia bank set up a laundering branch in London; in return he wants his family to be offered protection in the West.
Stellan Skarsgard plays the rude crude oligarch in a volume and style borrowed from Brian Blessed. Damian Lewis affects an unconvincing Belgravia accent as the one decent spymaster fighting the recalcitrance and lack of principles of his Whitehall superiors, a part which perhaps too obviously recycles Olivia Colman's in THE NIGHT MANAGER. There's not enough meat on Naomie Harris's role, but Ewan McGregor makes a more persuasive Ordinary Joe than MANAGER's Tom Hiddleston, who seemed a bit bland and too posh – I hope he won't be the next 007.
Perhaps OUR KIND OF TRAITOR has come too close on the heels of THE NIGHT MANAGER, making the similarities over-conspicuous. TRAITOR has a little less drama but a lot more heart. Le Carre is very good at endings – remember THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD? – and this one is particularly finely judged. This is up there with the best of his movies.