Review

Textbook spy intrigue makes November Man an easy mark

Mason (Luke Bracey) is a new CIA agent who teams up with a retired super spy to extract an imperiled colleague from Moscow in The November Man.
Mason (Luke Bracey) is a new CIA agent who teams up with a retired super spy to extract an imperiled colleague from Moscow in The November Man.

It's a simple enough request for our genre entertainment. There are certain basic parameters a genre film needs to follow at a bare minimum in order to be successful: A romance absolutely has to have a pair of characters that the audience wants to see together, for example; an action film should put its protagonist up against very long odds for success.

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Alice (Olga Kurylenko) is an undercover operative who witnesses some extremely scary business in Roger Donaldson’s The November Man.

For the spy thriller, the mandate is equally simple: The film has to be more clever than the average moviegoer, keeping a few steps ahead of its audience right up until the end.

The November Man

81 Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Will Patton, Patrick Kennedy

Director: Roger Donaldson

Rating: R, for strong violence including a sexual assault, language, sexuality/nudity and brief drug use

Running time: 108 minutes

If you get that bit right, you will have success even if aspects of the film don't seem to make an enormous amount of sense (Mission: Impossible), or are so complex as to require multiple viewings just to sort out all the myriad crossings, double-crossings and insane misdirections thrown at you (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). By contrast, failing this most basic necessity makes for a teeth-gnashing experience, even if you have a good cast and robust action pieces.

Roger Donaldson's film isn't a categorical failure -- too many talented people are involved with its production -- but its inability to make any kind of piercing intrigue out of its plot machinations is indeed infuriating. It's serviceable but just barely, a blandly predictable bit of piffle in which the international conspiracy is telegraphed, the hero never falters and evil government cover-ups are easily exposed (and indicted!) for the world to see.

Pierce Brosnan plays Peter Devereaux, a talented superspy for the CIA who is the mentor to hotheaded newbie Mason (Luke Bracey). When we first meet the pair, it is five years earlier, as Mason dramatically screws up a mission leaving an innocent child killed. In disgust, Peter leaves the agency and moves to a beautiful hollow in Switzerland where he runs a cafe and drinks a lot. Now his idyll is interrupted by a visit from his former boss, Hanley (Bill Smitrovich), who sends him on (all together now) "one last mission" to extract a fellow agent, Natalia (Mediha Musliovic), deep undercover with corrupt Russian politician Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski) poised to become the next president. It seems Peter has a long and storied history with Natalia, so he accepts and, in entirely predictable fashion, everything goes completely whack-a-doodle, ultimately leaving him running for his life from CIA goons, the Russians and super-deadly assassin Alexa (Amila Terzimehic), sporting a tight, hot dog-shaped bun and a way with silencers.

Obligatorily, there is a beautiful, innocent woman that Peter has to protect, Alice (Olga Kurylenko), a humanitarian case worker who may or may not have had as one of her charges another woman who seems to have some key bit of damaging information against Federov and who is also on the run from damn near everybody as a result.

After making his reputation in the States as the smugly commanding Remington Steele in his salad days, Brosnan has made an interesting career going a bit against type and producing the kinds of anti-hero characters in The Matador and After the Sunset that go a long way to washing away the soapy taste of '80s-era American TV. Here, however, he's resorting back to type, a too-good-to-be-believable superspy who has everything under control and never seems backed into a corner. His calm superiority is meant to give the audience solace, but it just feels as if he's never pressed beyond his ungodly limits making an amusing anecdote for him but never really challenging his well-being.

If the film has a singular weakness (and there is more than one), it's the sloppy, lazy fashion in which screenwriters Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek (working from a novel by Bill Granger) continually get their heroes out of a jam. In the course of the film, we're asked to believe a neophyte civilian can somehow infiltrate a highly secured Russian stronghold and hold a shard of broken glass against a high-ranking politician's neck, then get away scot-free; a highly trained CIA operative who has killed dozens of people without anguish or remorse would suddenly turn his whole philosophy around, based on a single conversation; and, that Peter, who is forced to resort to a different plan when someone close to him is kidnapped for negotiation purposes, relies on an absolutely impossible turn of events in order to have everything come out his way. Oh, and that a super-assassin, who has managed to kill numerous, highly trained CIA operatives without a hitch, would be foiled by a civilian with a shovel.

It's too much to bear, as you can imagine, which is unfortunate, because Donaldson, who has had some success as an action director in higher-level fare The Bank Job and No Way Out, has a way with pacing and character beats that can lend itself to far more interesting moviemaking. Alas, here it's just not to be. In a thriller, if we're always two steps ahead of the filmmakers, we can take very little pleasure in seeing just how predictably right we were all along.

MovieStyle on 08/29/2014

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