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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
No match for the original TV series
Part of John Le Carré's brilliance is his ability to show the physical and psychological claustrophobia of his spy world as an extension of the social claustrophobia of the British political and intelligence classes, how the exquisitely petty social snobberies that define these people to one another also provide the scaffolding for how the intelligence machine runs while constraining its imagination and abilities. It has to smell stuffy and sour like a senior common room or a scuffed-up gentlemen's club for the characters and their motives to work. But this film inhabits some art-dream of 1960s London, Prague and Paris where the spaces are implausibly wide and cinematic and the characters like placed statues, not the drab smoky offices, cage elevators and tormented snobs of Le Carré's books. The film comes over as very design-driven, its world and characters an art piece rather than anything really evocative of the British spy world of the 1960s-70s. It's interestingly filmed, but the world is made of visual set pieces that don't always ring true, and sometimes the design is distracting - as, for example, when the actors' faces are almost obscured by a ton of buzzing "period" film grain. The original TV series did a much better job of integrating character, plot and setting much more plausibly.
The film also has to move too fast for the plot, which means they had to cut and simplify so ruthlessly that It feels like a mere gesture towards the original story, a skeleton with no warm flesh. As such, it's rather uninvolving. Everyone does a decent job, and they're all great actors, but there wasn't much material for most of them to work with once all of the meaningful silences had been accommodated and the detail cut out. Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux and Tom Hardy as Ricky Tarr give the most emotionally arresting performances. There was very little hint of Smiley's rich inner life in Gary Oldman's portrayal, which may be more the script's fault than his own. But the characters of Smiley, Hayden and Esterhase were so much richer in the 1979 TV series than they are here, and if you've seen the original it's hard not to miss that.
So not a bad film, competent and visually interesting, but emotionally very weak compared to the novel or the original TV series. It turns out that the intricacy of the original story and the accuracy of its social and physical portrayals are much of what made it so gripping. Pared down this much, it loses its grip.
The Courier (2020)
A cursory spy movie lacking in detail and interest
Businessman Greville Wynne gets recruited by the intelligence services to communicate with OIeg Penkovsky, a high-level source in the USSR. He does it for a while, and he and the source become friends, then it all goes predictably wrong. There's about as much interest in that summary as there is in this movie. It's like they took a template for a spy movie and forgot to fill in any of the detail. It's all passably done - good period sets and props, no terrible acting - but there's nothing for us or the actors to get our teeth into.
The plot is moved along at crucial moments by hasty montages which add to the generic, hand-waving feel of the whole thing. Some men did spy stuff and hoped not to get caught, with predictable results. It makes MI6 and the CIA look naive for expecting the KGB to be stupid, and it fails to convey the weight and difficulty of what Penkovsky did given his position. The characters aren't well enough built for you to start feeling for them. In all, it feels like the movie equivalent of an introductory paragraph on Wikipedia.
The film is based on a true story which must have been full of suffering and drama, but it managed to make the story seem less interesting and consequential than it actually was. A hurried film and a wasted opportunity.
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
If you want a Breaking Bad spinoff, watch Better Call Saul
After all the build-up this was a huge letdown. Netflix has a way of paying big money to make mediocre movies it seems.
For the first third of the movie I was thinking this wasn't bad scene-setting, then around halfway through it dawned on me that this was the actual plot.
We see a lot of Todd, who is a well drawn character, but does anyone think it's a good idea for the one and only Breaking Bad follow-up to spend a whole lot of time looking at Todd? It served to explain where Jesse was looking for money, and to set up one scene in which Jesse realizes how broken he is, but it was too drawn out and tangential.
Badger and Skinny Pete seemed like a parody of themselves, speaking lame lines with "" stuck on the end to remind you that these guys were funny in Breaking Bad. And why would Jesse flee right back to his former buddies? Surely that's a dumb move. Why were there no police watching their place? They'd know who he associated with. So that was all there just to shoehorn some old favorite characters into the movie it seems.
The main showdown with some randoms in a welding shop was contrived and implausible. Suddenly Jesse is a wild west sharpshooter who just scares half the gang away with his awesomeness. And then there was an unexplained and gratuitous explosion, just for the sake of having a shot where Jesse sits in the car with stuff exploding behind him. A pale imitation of some Breaking Bad scenes I guess.
And then there were flashbacks with Walter, Mike and Jane that served conspicuously little purpose except to boost up the cast list and help sell the movie. And then suddenly it's the end.
It actually surprised me to see that this was written and directed by Vince Gilligan. Perhaps he's not the genius he seemed to be, or perhaps he had a better team first time around, or perhaps Netflix constrained his creativity, or perhaps he has lost interest and needed cash. Who knows. It's a shame they made this.
That said, Better Call Saul is an excellent Breaking Bad spinoff. Way better than this lame movie.
The Expanse: Delta-V (2018)
Every show has its bum episode - this is it
This episode is jarring and scrappy compared to most. It's more like the beginning of a new season than the continuation of one. Time has passed since the previous episode and we have to be brought up to date with many developments, so there's a lot to pack in and it's hurried and choppy. On top of that we get some odd character developments, the introduction of an apparently arbitrary and intrusive new storytelling device (the documentary team, though it looks like this is heading somewhere) and some random-feeling new characters being introduced. Overall it's one of those duct tape episodes that exists to join what came before to what will come after, and it's not up to the quality of the rest.
Stranger Things: Chapter Seven: The Lost Sister (2017)
Really awful
If the show had started off this bad I would have turned it off. Tacky and unconvincing, full of nonsense characters and bad acting. An insult to the series, the main actress and the viewer.
After this episode I found it impossible to get back into the series for the remaining two episodes. It felt like their heart wasn't in it any more - just a bunch of cheap laughs, predictable monster scenes and arbitrary scraps of plot. The focus had been lost.
I'd recommend skipping this episode because you may find the rest of the season watchable without it. For me it left a bad taste that didn't leave.