This short review appears on The Upcoming here.
The November Man is a spy
thriller with Pierce Brosnan, who obviously wants to try out his own darker
version of Bond without getting sued. The film is based on the seventh
instalment of a novel series by Bill Granger and there is apparently a sequel
already on the way.
Brosnan is Peter Devereaux, an
aging secret agent who is called back into action by his old boss Hanley (Bill
Smitrovich) to ensure the safe extraction of Natalia Ulanova (Mediha
Musliovic), a secretary of the future Russian president Federov (Lazar
Ristovski), who knows something that Federov does not want revealed. Olga
Kurylenko, playing committed social worker Alice, gets shoehorned into the film
too.
The film disappoints almost
immediately. There have been few decent action films this millennium (the first
three Bourne films are all that spring to mind) and The November Man seemed
to be offering a dopey but fun throwback ‘90s film. But, unfortunately, the
film is humourless and painfully clichéd from the start. It is po-faced
throughout, leaving the actors desperately trying to make it all seem worth
caring about, and when the plot kicks in, it is either incompressible or
ridiculous or both. When you finally find out the significance of the title, it
is so stupid that you wonder why no one stopped it.
Roger Donaldson directs in an
uninterested, slapdash fashion. The final scene is a great example of a
filmmaker not in control of his medium – it just does not work. He injects a
few splashes of bloody violence in an effort to liven things up, but it is
clear he couldn’t care less.
There is one half-decent idea
about there being so many spies running around that no one knows who is a
friend and who is an enemy, but the film does absolutely nothing with it. The
only other thing that is decent about the film is that it suggests that the CIA
are actively involved in war crimes and is, in very general terms, evil. It is
nice to see mainstream films in which the CIA are the villains but the film
just does not care enough to be truly committed to this point, or any other.
Bill Granger wrote the November
Man novels during the Cold War, but that is not the reason that this film feels
so dated and so tired. It is simply down to sheer laziness. Dull, dull, dull.
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