Tag: Spy thrillers

Red Sparrow (2018)

Jennifer Lawrence tries but fails with dismal material in the dreadful Red Sparrow

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence (Dominika Egorova), Joel Edgerton (Nate Nash), Matthias Schoenaerts (Ivan Vladimirovich Egorov), Charlotte Rampling (Marton), Mary-Louise Parker (Stephane Boucher), Ciaran Hinds (Colonel Zakharov), Joely Richardson (Nina Egorova), Bill Camp (Marty Gable), Jeremy Irons (General Vladimir Andreiovich Korchnoi), Thekla Reuten (Marta Yelenova), Douglas Hodge (Colonel Maxim Volontov)

Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is in trouble. After an act of sabotage by her dance partner, her career in ballet is over. Out of options, she is forced into enrolling at the elite FSB Sparrow School by her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts). There young men and women are trained, under the tutelage of its controlling Matron (Charlotte Rampling), to sacrifice all their pride and their bodies for the good of Mother Russia. Thrown into the field, Dominika finds herself entangled with the CIA Agent Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), whom she has been ordered to seduce.

Red Sparrow is a bad film on several levels. Firstly, it’s at heart a trashy espionage movie that confuses being about intelligence with actually being intelligent. A few late twists doesn’t suddenly make this a work of genius. Secondly, its attitude of being about this damn dirty business of spying manages to make it so grim it’s not even fun to watch. Finally, it’s the sort of film that thinks constantly telling us it has a strong female lead at its heart is the same as actually having a strong female lead at its heart.

To take that final point last… Poor Jennifer Lawrence. Surely only the $20million she was paid for this film attracted her to this. I’ll start by saying she feels miscast in a role that requires a ruthlessness and capacity for viciousness that is not a natural part of her range. But this film struggles to make her feel like a character with real agency. During the course of this film, she has her leg broken, nearly gets raped (twice), strips down in front of a group of people (twice), gets smacked in the face, beaten, tortured, stabbed, shot… And a few sudden last minute gear reversals which suggest that she has been playing her own game this whole time don’t shake the impression that the film is wallowing in the torture and violence that runs through the film.

Anyway, the film is reliant on that because it’s not sharp or clever enough to really have anything else in there in its place. So we stumble from violent set piece to violent set piece, while the characters talk incessantly about macguffins and characters we care almost nothing about. The film has an almost impenetrable plot, not because it’s complex, but because it’s poorly explained and impossible to care about. Actors who are way too good for this material – and I mean the whole cast – struggle to put fire and energy into a shaggy dog story that never goes anywhere.

This all serves to make it a dull film. It really should be a guilty pleasure. All the right material is in there. Spy thrillers make for fun films. It’s interesting to have a woman at the centre of it. It’s got good actors. But too many scenes and set pieces veer towards the overly violent and sexual. For a film that is about a silly spy training school turning out honey trap agents, this film seems determined to ram the grimness of spying in our faces at every turn. This makes sense for a high brow Le Carre adaptation. It makes no sense for silly high-concept Jennifer Lawrence star vehicle.

Who really needs to watch poor Jennifer being slapped about and ill-treated for over two hours? Who has the patience for it? Who is going to enjoy it? The film struggles to get across the idea that Dominika is good at this spying game so it needs other characters to say it openly. Its rug pull towards the end lacks all signposting so gives no satisfaction whatsoever. By the time it comes round you’ll have long ceased stop caring about anything in it as well. A tedious, grimy and rather unpleasant film from start to finish that leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965)

Richard Burton lands in Cold War trouble in classic Le Carre adaptation The Spy Why Came In From the Cold

Director:  Martin Ritt

Cast: Richard Burton (Alec Leamas), Claire Bloom (Nan Perry), Oskar Werner (Fiedler), Sam Wanamaker (Peters), George Voskovec (East German Defence Attorney), Rupert Davies (George Smiley), Cyril Cusack (Control), Peter van Eyck (Hans-Dieter Mundt), Michael Hordern (Ashe), Robert Hardy (Dick Carlton), Bernard Lee (Patmore)

Spy stories fall into two camps. You get the wham-bam blast of James Bond and then you also get the grimy, isn’t-this-a-damn-dirty-trade stories that John Le Carré helped to turn into a major alternative. The book that really kicked off Le Carré’s career was The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a slim, brilliantly written story of spies working exclusively in shades of grey. The book was a smash, the film was inevitable, and a damn fine film it turned out to be.

Richard Burton plays Alec Leamas, a former head of Berlin Station for the British Secret Service, who is recruited by the services’ leader Control (Cyril Cusack) as part of an elaborate scheme to discredit the cunning and dangerous head of the Stasi office in Berlin, Hans-Dieter Mundt (Peter van Eyck). Leamas will go through a pretence of disgraced dismissal, alcoholism, jail time and half a dozen other indecencies to attract the attention of the East German defector recruiters in the UK. But will the relationship he develops during his disgrace with librarian and idealistic communist Nan Perry (Claire Bloom) endanger the whole mission?

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is shot in a grimy, gloomy black-and-white which is completely appropriate for the morally questionable escapades its characters get up to. Like Le Carré’s novel, the ends justify any means here, and questions of morality and justice are best benched. Characters who can’t let themselves to forget justice are doomed in this film. Genuine shows of real emotion and feeling are generally signs in this film that a person is doomed.

Martin Ritt’s literate script captures the style and tone of Le Carré extremely well – this is still one of the best, truest and most faithful capturing of Le Carré on the screen – and his direction also has a wonderful mixture of shabby kitchen-sink realism and classic Hollywood film noir class that makes for a brilliantly involving package. The pace of the film holds pretty well, beautifully carrying us through a parade of agents recruiting Leamas for the East Germans (each of which are dismissed with a shocking curtness by the next one along), and the final court room trial of Mundt (with its intricate exploration of the complex plotting of the novel) is extremely involving.

The film also has the benefit of a number of terrific performances, led by Richard Burton in the lead. By this stage of his career, Burton was already felt by many to be lost to serious acting in favour of big budget, Liz Taylor-starring pictures and Hollywood entertainment. But he rouses himself here to give one of his best ever performances. Leamas is a shabby, beaten down, little man (despite being played by Burton!) whose chippiness, dissatisfaction and aggression make him perfect as a possible defector. Ritt’s camera often focuses on Burton’s unflinching stares, his eyes seem to bore into the person he’s talking to, little oceans of anger and resentment.

Burton’s Leamas is deep down sick and tired of the world of spying, its betrayals and lies, and sickened with self-disgust at his own involvement in it. Burton skilfully underplays the role throughout, largely ignoring any temptation for grandstanding or big acting moments – instead he is as compromised, grey and lost as the rest of the film, in a superb performance of cynical disaffection. Bunched up, his grand voice dialled down, his eyes flickering with resentment – a great performance.

Claire Bloom is rather affecting as Nan (hilariously, her name was changed from Liz in the book as the producers feared she would be confused with the rather more famous Liz in Burton’s life) and Oskar Werner gives the film a major burst of energy just as it is flagging from one interrogation of Leamas too many, as a chippy, eager, sharp Stasi officer, who is determined to see justice done. The rest of the cast are filled out with some classy Brit character actors, who excel from suave (Robert Hardy) to seedy (Michael Hordern), while Cyril Cusack brings “Control” to cynical life and Rupert Davies gets to the be the first actor to play George Smiley on screen (even if he is only really an extra here).

Spy is a film of atmosphere. Frequently it trusts the viewer to catch up the plot as they go. Leamas actions are not always explained until late on – and we are constantly suspecting that we are only seeing half the story. Its a film that plays its cards close to the chest. This might alienate some, but it’s a true representation of Le Carre – and fits perfectly with the weary sense Leamas has of not being in control of his own life.

But what Ritt does so well is keeping that tonal sense of there always being another shady, compromising twist around the corner. All is never what it seems, and the film ends with an especially bleak series of footnotes as we find out just how ruthless both sides are prepared to be in this soulless chess game of Cold War politics. It’s the moments like this that Spy Who Came in From the Cold really nails. For Le Carré fans the film is a must: for those less interested in the world of espionage, they may find it takes a little too much time.

Jason Bourne (2016)

Matt Damon swings back into action in after-thought Jason Bourne

Director: Paul Greengrass

Cast: Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), Tommy Lee Jones (Director Robert Dewey), Alicia Vikander (Heather Lee), Vincent Cassel (The Asset), Julia Stiles (Nicky Parsons), Riz Ahmed (Aaron Kalloor), Ato Essandoh (Craig Jeffers), Scott Shepherd (Edwin Russell), Bill Camp (Malcolm Smith), Vinzenz Kiefer (Christian Dassault), Gregg Henry (Richard Webb)

They say you should never go back. Producers had been begging Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon to get back together again and make another Bourne film. After all, there was hardly anyone asking for a sequel to that Jeremy Renner one was there? But Jason Bourne seems like a film that’s been made after Greengrass and Damon ran out of reasons for saying no. I can’t decide if we can blame them for that or not. But their making the film at all suggests they aren’t really losing any sleep about whether people feel this half-hearted effort has an impact on the legacy of the others.

Anyway it’s ten years later. The world is an increasingly technical place, with people living in an era of increasing social unrest and anti-government fury. Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), recovered from his amnesia, now lives off-the-grid – until of course he’s unearthed by his old colleague Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles). Parsons is now working with a hacker commune in Iceland, and has unearthed more evidence about the shady CIA programme, Treadstone, that Bourne used to be a part of, and about Bourne’s own recruitment into it. Meeting in Athens in the middle of an anti-government riot, Parsons is killed and Bourne is set on a collision course with the CIA as well as finding out more about the mysterious death of his father 20 years before. 

Jason Bourne is basically going through the motions. There is an attempt to add another layer of mystery around Bourne’s background, but it barely seems to add much to the hinterland of Bourne we’ve already learned about in the last couple of films. Furthermore, I’m uncomfortable with a Bourne here who goes increasingly on a rampage of revenge. Part of the charm – or rather what makes Bourne different – in the previous films was that he was a man who lived in a world of violence, but didn’t care for it himself. He used brutal force only when it was absolutely necessary, and several times chose not to take a personal revenge. Here however, he dispatches at least three people, which doesn’t seem to square with the character as we’ve previously seen him.

Furthermore, the film seems to be struggling to reclaim Bourne as one of the formal good guys, a patriot and American hero. Again part of what made him different in the original trilogy was that he stood outside the government and nations, that (as Greengrass once said) “he’s on our side”. Here he’s clearly less than sympathetic to anti-government forces, and strongly opposed to exposing CIA secrets. In fact he ends up feeling rather conservative here to be honest, and more like the faceless killer that he started as rather than a renegade. 

It’s not helped by the fact that the plot is pretty meh, a remix of different elements from previous films, carefully ticked off to make sure we get everything we could expect. So we get a reworking of various car chases, fights, tense meetings in public locations etc. etc. The film-making is very well done – Greengrass rewrote the book on how to make films like this, and he carries that on here, brilliantly mixing twitchy editing, handheld camera work, immersive film-making and gloomy silences to create a really wonderfully done viewing experience. It’s just more of the same from the originals. The film just ends up living in the shadow of the originals, rather than really forging something out on its own.

Greengrass tries to tap into contemporary ideas. We get the sense of anti-establishment clashes and Internet data scams – but it never really feels like it goes anywhere or coalesces into any real point at the end of it. What is the actual message of this film? There are hints that Tommy Lee Jones’ gravelly CIA Director and Riz Ahmed’s Mark Zuckerberg-lite tech expert are planning some sort of mass intrusion on people’s privacy – but the film never explains this or explores it. It never even makes Bourne aware of it – and since Bourne is our “window” into this world, that means we never understand it either.

I mean, the film is fine other than that, but that’s all it really is. Matt Damon still hasn’t lost it as Bourne – and blimey he should have some inverted award for how little he speaks in this film – and he has not only the physicality but also the worn-down, haunted look of a man who has seen way, way too much. There are professional performances from the rest, but nothing that stretches any of the actors here, with Alicia Vikander particularly under-used as an unreadable CIA agent. 

But that sums up the whole film. Despite all the attempts to build in a modern “torn from the headlines” angle to the story, it feels more like Greengrass and Damon are quite happily (and with some enthusiasm at least) going through the motions in order to pick up a cheque. And I guess that’s fine. It just means we are probably not going to rush to see this again.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Bond finds himself in another pretty pickle in The Spy Who Loved Me

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Cast: Roger Moore (James Bond), Barbara Bach (Anya Amasova), Curd Jürgens (Karl Stromberg), Richard Kiel (Jaws), Caroline Munro (Naomi), Walter Gotell (General Gogol), Bernard Lee (M), Desmond Llewelyn (Q), Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny), Geoffrey Keen (Frederick Gray), Robert Brown (Vice-Admiral Hargreaves), George Baker (Captain Benson), Michael Billington (Sergei Barsov), Vernon Dobtcheff (Max Kalba), Nadim Sawalha (Fekkesh)

Roger Moore had made two Bond films before he made The Spy Who Loved Me – but this is the one when he finally hit upon the formula that works for him. It’s also probably the moment where the Bond films became – once for all – comedy adventure capers. It was but a few more degrees from here until Bond was telling a tiger to “sit” or racing past a double-taking pigeon in the middle of St Mark’s Square. And the public loved it. For better or worse, Moore’s Bond here helped define the franchise for a whole generation.

Anyway, the story. It’s eerily familiar in many ways to Thunderball and You Only Live Twice: a power-crazed lunatic (Karl Stromberg) running a secret organisation wants to destroy the world. His plan? To capture one American and one Soviet submarine and use them to fire nuclear missiles at the nation’s two capitals, to kickstart a nuclear war, leaving only his underwater kingdom intact. Just as well then that an over-keen Stromberg (Curd Jürgens) first captures a British sub, meaning James Bond (Roger Moore) is called in to investigate. Bond will work with the USSR’s finest agent – Anya Amasova, Triple X (Barbara Bach) – to find out what’s going on and why.

TSWLM is a lot of fun, possibly the ultimate expression of what a lot of people think Bond is. It’s hugely silly, rather exciting and has almost no connection with reality whatsoever. Moore goes through the whole thing with his eyebrow forever arched, tipping the wink at the audience – “You do know, dear boy, this is all dreadfully silly stuff”. Sometimes in Bond this humour gets a bit much – but here it’s pretty much pitched perfectly. And Moore looks like he is having the time of his life.

The film is crammed with action set pieces in striking locations: the Alps! The pyramids! A converted oil tanker base! Nothing is left to the imagination, and everything is thrown at the screen. It gets the sense of excitement right from the pre-credits sequence, with Bond’s high-speed ski chase across the alps from Russian would-be hitmen. Fools – what chance did they have? I don’t know what I like most about this scene: is it the wild ski stunts? The way music and camera action combine so well? The fact that it’s crystal clear Moore probably spent precisely zero days on location for this sequence? What am I talking about, it’s got to be that insane parachute jump at the end – with the camera leaving it just long enough for you to start to think “is Bond going to get out of this one?”. (Spoilers he does.)

That’s almost nothing compared to the famous Lotus-turned-submarine car chase, which pretty much set the standard for all the car-based action (not to mention gadget filled cars) that would follow in the franchise. The idea of a car that turns into a submarine: it’s both brilliant and so overwhelmingly silly that, like Bond at its vibrant best, it seems to transcend class and logic into a higher plane of excitement.

And all this with a plot that is almost staggeringly stupid. Jurgens has a lot of arch, naughty fun as scheming monomaniac (with subtle webbed hands) Stromberg, a pompous arsehole and a great villain. Of course he wasn’t a physical threat – hence the invention of Jaws, surely the most popular henchman ever invented for Bond. Jaws is a lunking, vicious but strangely endearing brute – it’s hard to put your finger on why he’s strangely likeable, maybe it’s just the totally absurd idea of a hitman whose killer tools are metal teeth. Maybe it’s because Richard Kiel has such a dorky sense of humour – and is as good at the glance at the camera as Moore himself is.

Of course it is a dated film – and it’s always the women that show it. If this set a lot of good Bond archetypes, then it also helped to cement a few bad ones. Anya Amasova is (allegedly) the greatest agent Russia has. Not that you would know it, as she stumbles in this film from moments of staggering incompetence and stupidity to victimhood and damsel-in-distress. There is a hint of character development – Bond offs her boyfriend in that alpine chase literally without a backward glance – but that’s soon forgotten by the end under Bond’s charms. The poor woman can’t even drive stick (“That’s reverse, let’s try again shall we” says Bond with smackable smugness) and by the end of the film she’s bikini-clad and being rescued by Bond. It says a lot when the strongest thing about her character is that her name isn’t an innuendo.

But you can let it go, because the rest of the film is such good fun. Everything is nonsense of course, and you could steer a submarine through the plot holes. If Stromberg only needs two submarines to start his evil plan, why on earth does he grab a third one at the start of the final act? (Just as well he does, of course, as otherwise Bond would never get on board his base.) Stromberg is ruthless enough to eliminate three underlings and to set up a nuclear war to wipe out the world – but those captured submarine crews he keeps alive, imprisoned, with a small guard, next to the armoury on his base. Ooops. His plan is almost effortlessly undone with a radio message from Bond. But never mind. It doesn’t matter.

The point is that this is all great fun and basically set the tone for the next ten years of Bond films – until Dalton shifted gears. Moore is really good in it, as a sort of ringmaster of silliness – and he’s clearly enjoying it wildly. The Spy Who Loved Me is his best film – and for all its dumbness, its leaning into cheap humour, its ludicrous plot and sexist attitudes, it’s still up there at the top of the franchise. Because for a lot of people, all those negatives are exactly what they now expect from Bond.

The Man From UNCLE (2015)

Armie Hammer and Henry Cavill try, and fail, to get some zing out of The Man From UNCLE

Director: Guy Richie

Cast: Henry Cavill (Napoleon Solo), Armie Hammer (Ilya Kuryakin), Alicia Vikander (Gaby Teller), Elizabeth Debicki (Victoria Vinciguerra), Jared Harris (Adrian Sanders), Hugh Grant (Alexander Waverly), Luca Calvani (Alexander Vinciguerra), Sylvester Groth (Uncle Rudi), Christian Berkel (Udo Teller), Misha Kuznetsov (Oleg)

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.was a 1960s TV spy caper series, which I confess I’ve never seen an episode of but I’m reliably told (by my wife who has) that it’s all larks and fun. This Guy Ritchie remake, on the other hand, is a tonal mess that has no idea what the hell it is. Only Hugh Grant gets anywhere near to appearing in a caper movie – probably because he’s virtually the only member of the cast who might have grown up watching the original series.

Anyway, in the early 1960s Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) is an international master-thief turned CIA agent (this suggests his character is a whole lot more fun than he actually is). Ilya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) is a KGB super-agent, dealing with issues of psychosis (yup more fun to be had there). This odd couple are ordered to team up and work with car mechanic (no seriously) Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), whose father is working with renegade Italian fascists, led by femme fatale Victoria Viniciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), to build a new nuclear mastery over the world. Or something.

It should be a ridiculous, overblown, mix of Bond and high 60s camp. Instead it’s dreary, chemistry-free, largely uninvolving sub-Mission: Impossible high jinks that I’m not ashamed to say I dozed off during at one point. Would that I had slept through more of it. It’s quite damning when the most enjoyable thing about it is thinking about the accent Olympics going on (we have a Brit playing an American, an American playing a Russian, a Swede playing a German, an Australian playing an Italian, an Irishman playing an American…).

No matter which way the three leads are arranged, Cavill, Vikander and Hammer have no chemistry at all in any combination. There is precisely zero bromance between the two leads. Vikander and Hammer have a will-they-won’t-they romance that comes from absolutely nowhere and leads nowhere (set up for sequels that will never come). Cavill looks the part, but completely lacks the cheeky, self-confident, “I’m-enjoying-all-this” charm that the part requires – instead he’s flat and boring. Hammer has more of the winking-at-the-camera cool, but he’s saddled with a part that frequently requires him to burst out in hotel-room-trashing outbursts of anger. Vikander just looks a bit bored with the whole thing.

These rather joyless characters go through a series of action set pieces, none of which got my pulse racing, and all of which felt like off cuts from a lousy Mission: Impossible sequel. Car chases, fisticuffs, gun fights, explosions, boat chases – they all tick by with no wit or pleasure involved anywhere. In these sort of things, you need to feel the characters are such adrenaline junkies that they sorta enjoy the crazy antics they get thrown into – you don’t get any of that from these three.

Much as I like Elizabeth Debicki, she can do little with her underwritten part – I mean I get that the plot isn’t the main thing in a film like this, but they could have at least given our villain a character. Instead she is as cardboard cut-out as the rest of the storyline. The acting from the bulk of the cast is also really odd – some seem aware they are in a tongue-in-cheek spy film, others seem to think they are in an espionage thriller. It’s a mess. There are scenes of pratfall comedy followed by grim scenes of torture and violence. In one juddering moment of this spy romp, the flipping Holocaust is dragged in as a shorthand for identifying a character as an “ultimate villain” – which given he had our hero strapped to a chair and was about to torture him, I think we could all have worked out without exploiting genocide. Anyone else think pulling this appalling real world event (with photos!) into a stupid caper movie is really tasteless? Did no one watch this thing while it was being edited?

I will say the design is pretty good and it’s well shot. But compare this to the fun and games of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films (which this is obviously trying to emulate) and the total lack of chemistry at its heart becomes immediately clear. Hugh Grant is a complete relief when he turns up as he’s the only actor who actually looks like he is enjoying his part and wants to be there. It was a big box office bomb and it’s no surprise. No one is having fun, the spirit of the original series seems to have been completely lost, and the lead actors totally fail to bring the leading-man pizzazz the film needs. Perfect if you want a nap.

Bridge of Spies (2015)

Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance find common ground in the Cold War in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks (James B Donovan), Mark Rylance (Rudolf Abel), Amy Ryan (Mary Donovan), Sebastian Koch (Wolfgang Vogel), Alan Alda (Thomas Watters), Austin Stowell (Francis Gary Powers), Scott Shepherd (CIA Agent Hoffman), Billy Magnussen (Doug Forrester), Jesse Plemons (Joe Murphy), Dakin Matthews (Judge Mortimer W Byers)

Steven Spielberg is perhaps best known for his cult block busters – and has indeed directed some of the finest popular adventure movies you are likely to see. But more of his output – particularly in recent years – is focused on intelligent, slightly old-school, handsome, period films that look to shed light on political and social issues of the past. Bridge of Spies falls firmly into this camp, an extremely well-made (if rather dry at times) prestige picture, blessed with a fascinating story and some very fine performances.

In 1957, Soviet agent Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested in New York and put on trial. He’s the most unpopular man in America – except perhaps for the man plucked from a list of New York attorneys to defend him, James B Donovan (Tom Hanks). Donovan doesn’t endear himself to the American public by successfully defending Abel from the death penalty, but he’s proved right when U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is shot down over the USSR, and a prisoner exchange is set up for Abel and Powers, with Donovan negotiating the details in a wintery Berlin.

Bridge of Spies has an old-fashioned charm to it – you can totally imagine it popping up on a bank holiday afternoon. It’s what you might call “grown-up entertainment” in the sense that it tells a character-focused story. It’s made with an unfussy assurance that never allows its cinematic excellence to get flashy, and it patiently unfolds an intriguing character study that gives excellent opportunities to some gifted actors. 

It’s also got a vein of wit running through it – you can see the fingerprints of the Coen brothers, brought in to do a polish of the script. They are there in the touches of the absurd as Donovan goes behind the Iron Curtain, mixing with an eccentric group of East Germans pretending to Abel’s family. Their also there in the moments of chill around the East German forces who suppress freedom and endanger lives. But it’s brought to life because Spielberg is such a wonderful, vibrant director.

Spielberg knows where to bring the flash and where to settle and let the camera watch the actors at work. Despite the calm of the general shooting, the film is packed with some wonderful sequences of bravura film-making, told so skilfully and with enough confidence that they don’t need to draw attention to themselves with overly flashy camera work or editing. But sequences such as the one that begins the film with Abel unknowingly being followed through New York, or Powers’ U-2 flight being shot down, or a horrified Donovan watching luckless Germans try to climb the Berlin Wall while he rides a train expelling him from East Germany, are made with a confident, unflashy flair.

It’s a film which has a real understanding of the paranoia and knee-jerk prejudice of the Cold War (on both sides of the curtain, but particularly in America), that mixes this with a note of hope in the essential decency of those on the ground – Roger Ebert described it as like a John Le Carre if it had been directed by Frank Capra – and that’s a good description. Spielberg’s film casts Donovan as the “little guy” who has to do the right thing and struggle to be accepted by his fellow Americans. Donovan’s travails in East Berlin have a Capra-ish quality to them, as his straight-shooting decency and integrity come up against the oblique games and half-truths of professional diplomats and spies. Abel as well is basically a solid, stand-up guy with a very clear moral compass and a dry wit that points out the quirks of both American and Soviet systems.

Tom Hanks is perfect casting as Donovan. He’s much overlooked as a great actor, and Donovan plays to his strengths, using all his integrity and trustworthiness to great effect. His Donovan is an honest broker, a man who believes above all in the cause of justice and has a good-natured confidence that allows him to never be flummoxed or even to show too much impatience with those putting obstacles in his way, even as he works overtime to get his way. It’s a perfect Hanks part played by perfection.

The film also boasts an excellent, Oscar-winning, performance by Mark Rylance as Rudolf Abel. Embracing the movies for the first time, Rylance could probably play Abel standing on his head, and this acting heavyweight turns in a performance full of sparkle and wit. Rylance is softly spoken, with a combination of world-weariness, wry humour and a dry unreadability. Abel however is also a fiercely loyal and decent man – and it’s the contrast and bond that develops between him and Donovan that powers the movie.

In fact you can’t help but miss him in the second half, interesting as Donovan’s patiently done and labyrinthine negotiations between the KGB, Stasi and CIA become. At times this second half becomes slightly drier than the rest – as if Spielberg can’t quite manage to keep the sense of intimidation and danger in place for the whole of these protracted scenes of bluff and double bluff. It’s also probably a fraction too long. It’s not a perfect movie after all – Donovan’s family are a series of bland identities (“Honey stop trying to end the Cold War and come to bed”) and the film’s final coda of Donovan getting the approval of the American people on contrasting train rides is a little too trite in its “ain’t freedom great” tone.

But I really like Bridge of Spies. It’s calm, it’s assured, it’s very well made, it’s very well acted. There is a lot of quality on show here – it practically drips off the show – and it’s made by a director who knows he doesn’t need to wrestle your attention with every shot to keep it. Spielberg is a director so talented that he can excel at making intelligent, grown-up movies that have something for everyone. For all that it’s slightly overlong and can’t quite keep its momentum up, I really like it.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Robert Redford goes on the run in conspiracy thriller Three Days of the Condor

Director: Sydney Pollack

Cast: Robert Redford (Joseph Turner), Faye Dunaway (Kathy Hale), Cliff Robertson (Director Higgins), Max von Sydow (Joubert), John Houseman (Wabash), Addison Powell (Leonard Atwood), Walter McGinn (Sam Barber), Tina Chen (Janice), Michael Kane (SW Wicks), Don McHenry (Dr Lappe)

Three Days of the Condor never leaves you in any doubt that the real villains are those in power – and the possibility of escaping the reach of organisations like the CIA is beyond all of us. Condor is damn well-made though – Pollack’s direction is nearly faultless in its taut claustrophobia – even if the film itself gets a bit lost in its confusing obliqueness.

Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) is a quiet, boyish, Robert-Redfordish academic whose job is to read books published all over the world and report back to the CIA any familiarities with any secret operations past or present, or any good ideas from operations. One day, while out fetching lunch for his colleagues, he returns to find they have all been murdered by a hit-team led by a shadowy foreigner (Max von Sydow). Calling in the CIA, he finds he can’t trust anyone – and is forced to hide out by kidnapping a woman, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), whom he bumps into in a shop.

Three Days of the Condor opens with an electric pace. The build-up to the assassination of Turner’s co-workers is extremely tense, while the immediate after effects – and Turner’s lost, confused terror – is brilliantly involving. The stream of conspiracy-laced events, and the unsettling lack of security about who to trust creates a terrific mood of paranoia. Pollack’s editing is tight, and the photography keeps the action naturalistic and eerily involving. It creates an unsettling drama where no one can be trusted. 

It taps perfectly into that 1970s vibe of the state being omniscient and inhumane – Turner’s CIA contact will only talk to him using his code name, shows no human interest in his deceased comrades and only asks if Condor himself is “damaged”. Later Turner chippily asks why a senior agent is addressed by his name, while he is only called Condor. 

Redford is very good as Turner – perfectly convincing as the bookish man thrust into circumstances where he is out of his depth, but whose innate abilities to think fast and adapt allow him to believably keep one step ahead of those pursuing him. The film has a love for the grimy Le Carre-ish detail of espionage, which it mixes well with its James Bondish elements of hitmen, violence and sex. The script has good lines, and several excellent set-pieces that trade in that queasy feeling of being out-of-depth.

The momentum of the first half however eventually gets bogged down in the “working out” of the conspiracy. This is a bit hampered by the early acts of the movie being focused more on atmosphere than on plot build-up. With the exact purpose and function of Redford’s CIA role only really being loosely explained quite late on – and the various inter-relationships of the assorted CIA bigwigs we see also not really being that clear – the final reveal of the wrong uns is murky and doesn’t quite justify the build-up. 

Part of this is the film’s 1970s vibe – its sense that the resolution is, in a way, less important than the downer atmosphere and conspiracy tension – but it’s also a bit of a narrative flaw. It’s hard to invest in a story that never really gets put together or explained properly, and doesn’t really give us a sense of the major stakes at play or the reasons why various characters do what they do. 

Other factors also have dated the film, principally the relationship of Faye Dunaway’s Kathy and Redford’s Turner. Now there is an odd Stockholm syndrome relationship if ever I saw one. From Kathy tearfully fearing rape and assault for most of the first ten minutes of their screen time together – and with no reason to believe the story Turner is peddling – sure enough within a few hours of knowing each other this pair end up in bed together. The film attempts to suggest Turner’s ability to understand her personality (in a way no-one else ever has naturally) through her photographs brings them together –but nevertheless it’s basically a hostage falling into bed with her kidnapper, about 20 seconds after she stopped crying, after he has just released her from being tied up and gagged in her own bathroom. 

I guess it helps when your kidnapper looks like Robert Redford – and the film uses Redford’s innate trustability well – but it’s a little unsettling. Kathy swiftly becomes Turner’s little helper – but you never really get a sense that the she is an actual character, or that the film even really needs her that much. Dunaway is a good actress and plays the part very well – but there is an unsettling submissiveness and even exploitation to her character that dates the movie (not that we have moved past films where female character’s principal role is to have sex with the hero to ease his pain). The best you can say for this character is that she has “pluck”.

It’s dumping Turner down into Kathy’s home where the momentum leaks out of the film slightly. It’s a film that feels like it’s going to be set-up as a chase movie with a spy tinge, but it never really turns into that. On top of which, it takes time away from properly developing Turner’s enemies. His possible CIA opponents, led by Cliff Robertson and John Houseman, don’t really come into focus as characters. The performer who does stand out – largely because of the wry world-weariness he brings to the role – is Max von Sydow as the hitman Joubert, a character I’d happily see more of (where was his spin off?). 

Three Days of the Condor is a well-made triumph of atmosphere – but the later sections of the film don’t quite live up to the build-up, and the film doesn’t quite snap together as much as you would like in the second half. It gets lost in its labyrinthine schemes and then doesn’t have a resolution that seems interesting enough to make satisfying narrative sense.  It’s got some great moments in it, but it’s a flawed film.

Marathon Man (1976)

“Is it safe?”: Laurence Olivier interrogates Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man

Director: John Schlesinger

Cast: Dustin Hoffman (Thomas “Babe” Levy), Laurence Olivier (Dr Christian Szell), Roy Scheider (Henry “Doc” Levy), William Devane (Peter Janeway), Marthe Keller (Elsa Opel), Richard Bright (Karl), Marc Lawrence (Erhadt), Fritz Weaver (Professor Biesenthal)

The 1970s were the era of the conspiracy thriller. These were deliberately enigmatic, almost opaque, mysteries in which a humble individual was thrown up against sinister forces, backed by equally shady governments. Marathon Man is a stylish (if rather impenetrable) mystery that offers some gripping moments but gets bogged down a little too much in pleasure at its edginess, darkness and professional assurance.

Thomas “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a post-graduate student working on a re-evaluation of the McCarthy era, partly aimed at clearing his father’s name (who committed suicide while under investigation). Babe’s brother Henry “Doc” (Roy Scheider) works for a shady government organisation, and has recently narrowly avoided assassination twice in France. Doc suspects the killers were sent by renegade-Nazi Dr Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier). Szell’s New York-based brother was recently killed in a car crash, and with his death Szell has lost vital access to his cash reserve of diamonds in a New York bank, which he needs to maintain his safety in Uruguay.

I hadn’t seen Marathon Man for several years, and I was struck by how long it takes to get going: it takes a solid 45 minutes to get to the point. Huge swathes of the opening act of the film is all about getting the set-up and atmosphere, rather than establishing the story. It also seems to be about setting up as complex as possible a context for a film that boils down to a pretty straightforward plot. Nearly all the action that Doc gets up to in Europe is pretty much impossible to work out and never seems to tie in with the rest of the plot once it starts (exciting as it is to watch him dodge assassination attempts). Even the marathon running of the hero, and his relationship with Marthe Keller’s mysterious swiss woman doesn’t in the end really tie in that closely with the story.

But then that’s often the way with Marathon Man. It’s a film in love with atmosphere, its Hitchcockian tricks and its brooding creepiness more than with logic, story or even (really) character. It’s pretty hard to work out what’s going on, and the muttered plot revelations and Schlesinger’s grimy, often deliberately obscure, filming style doesn’t always help the humble viewer work things out. It wants to be like other 70s thrillers and juggle huge events – but it’s actually a rather small-scale, humble film telling a deliberately dreary story, scored with a very 70s combination of electronic noises and plonking piano notes. Plot wise it never really explains what is it about, and gets so bogged down in cross and double cross that it eventually loses its own way.

Where the film does succeed is its individual scenes. Mention Marathon Man and anyone who has heard of it will immediately say “the dental torture film?” They might even say “Is it safe?”. Marathon Man’s dramatic centre-piece is this unnervingly taut torture scene (not too graphic it has to be said – gosh violence in films has moved on since 1976!) where Szell questions Babe (just the one question repeated over and over again) while using his dental skills to “encourage” Babe to answer (ouch!). Ever been even slightly squeamish about going for a dental check-up? This probably isn’t the film for you (heck even one of Szell’s murderous henchmen can’t watch). 

Schlesinger shoots this scenes extremely well, with the camera lingering effectively on everyday dental tools that become dreaded torture devices. Schlesinger builds sequences around action and violence very effectively: escape attempts by Babe are gripping and fight scenes are extremely tense, particularly Doc’s fending off of an assassin in a Paris hotel room.

That scene also highlights another effective part of Schlesinger’s direction of the film: his use of bystanders. The life and death struggle between Doc and an assassin is witnessed across the street by a wheelchair-bound old man powerless to intervene. The opening road-rage deaths of Szell’s Nazi brother and a furious New York Jew are intercut constantly with the reactions and confusions of people in New York’s streets. In the film’s finest scene, Szell has to undertake a terrifying (for him) walk through New York’s Jewish quarter to collect and value his diamonds. His paranoia and fear of being recognised mean he sweatily watches every face. When he is recognised by an old woman – who shrieks for help from bemused passers-by – you really feel Szell’s fear that this woman will turn the mass of watching New Yorkers into a lynch mob. The bystanders really add depth to the film’s paranoia – they are both dangerous and also help to isolate the characters.

The film’s main strength is Laurence Olivier’s stand-out sinister performance as the Mengele-like Szell. Terrifyingly cold, paranoid and sadistically proud, Szell is a truly great villain, and Olivier channels all his Shakespearean experience into turning him into an iconic villain. The film also really works matching Olivier’s imperious old-schoolishness with Hoffman’s edgy, brittle method (the famous anecdote from the film was Olivier’s aghast reaction to Hoffman’s decision to prepare for the torture scene by not sleeping for three days: “Dear boy, would it not be easier to just act?”).

Hoffman is actually very good in the film as a man out of his depth from the start who slowly becomes as hardened and dangerous as the people chasing him. In fact Hoffman, is so involving and empathetically frightened in this film (his desperate range of answers to “Is it safe” are really affecting) that you overlook that he is clearly far too old to be playing a college graduate. Roy Scheider is similarly good as his domineering, but loving spy brother.

But it’s Olivier’s mastery of nastiness that really makes the film lodge in your mind. Schlesinger’s film is often long-winded, opaque and confusing, but Olivier delivers a master-class in imperious nastiness. Szell is a nightmare image of the well-spoken, polite monster and Olivier’s eyes carry a spark of intense menace. Honestly I could happily watch just the scenes he is in – particularly that masterfully performed street walking scene – and be happy to stick with that. The rest of the film is often a bit of a murky mess, but when Oliver is at the centre you forget all that. Marathon Man is a conspiracy thriller so confusing I think it confuses itself – but in the individual scenes it often brilliantly captures dread, discomfort and fear.

The Ipcress File (1965)

Michael Caine changes the face of spy films in The Ipcress File

Director: Sidney J. Furie

Cast: Michael Caine (Harry Palmer), Guy Doleman (Colonel Ross), Nigel Green (Major Dalby), Sue Lloyd (Jean Courtenay), Gordon Jackson (Carswell), Aubrey Richards (Dr Radcliffe), Frank Gatliff (Eric Grantby)

In the 1960s, the spy world was defined almost completely by the James Bond films. People had this idea of spies as glamorous, exciting people dealing with action and adventure in exotic locations. John Le Carré had started a counter-trend, but few alternative glances at the world of espionage landed with such skill as this adaptation of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File.

Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is a British agent in the secret service. Re-deployed to a section of the secret services headed up by Major Dalby (Nigel Green), he is tasked to investigate the disappearance of a number of leading scientists. But how does this link with mysterious Ipcress file?

The Ipcress File has dated very little – it’s still got a real sense of counter-culture cool, it’s engrossing and exciting, and it still makes comments that ring true about the lack of glamour in the world of espionage. It helps that it’s very well directed and designed, and that it has a star-making turn from Michael Caine (one of three he did in a row, with Zulu and Alfie). The Ipcress File looks and sounds great. It’s got an intriguing plot with twists and turns that still feel surprising and unexpected. It’s a great little spy thriller – and its deliberately small scale helps to keep it feeling fresh and inventive.

The British secret services are low-tech and underfunded. The offices are bare. Dalby’s operation is run out of what seems to a recruitment office. Cars are kept pretty basic. When Palmer is offered a new role, his first question is about a pay rise (he will get an extra £100 per year). There are no gadgets or glamour. Agents are partly selected not for their special skills but for their level of dispensability. The missions they undertake are confused or murky. The division line between allies and enemies is often unclear. Jobs are often boring or of minimal value (or both) – they’re more filing and paperwork than guns and glory.

Harry Palmer is about as opposite to Bond as you can get. He’s insolent. He’s chippy. He’s got a wry sense of humour. He struggles to hide his contempt for the toffs running the secret services. He’s a sergeant from the ranks. But he’s also cultured, well-read, intelligent and charming. He’s a great chef (surely the first film hero who cooks a detailed meal on screen – the shots of the hands were Len Deighton’s by the way). He cracks gags (more for his own amusement), often with a deadpan delivery. He has an eye for the ladies, but is hardly a Bond-style player. He’s a man of depth, who buys decent food, appreciates music and theatre, and carries a slightly bitter counter-culture grin just behind his eyes. He’s probably also the only film hero you’ll see shopping in a supermarket.

Michael Caine is perfect for this role (he went on to play it four more times). It’s a star-making role because he just drips charisma off the screen, while actually often doing very little. He underplays the role extremely effectively, using his natural calm and minimalism in front of the camera. It’s probably hard to appreciate how different it was at the time to see a man with a cockney accent play a lead role in a movie like this – other British film stars at the time had cut-glass RP accents. But Caine has a cheeky, insolent vibe that made him seem like the sort of hero you could relate to – the guy who is just working here, who could probably do a better job of running the show, but will never get that chance. Caine is also stubborn and bloody-minded, a squaddie at heart with a screw-you attitude just below the surface. He fits the role perfectly – and Palmer’s insubordination and sense of not being given his due matches up perfectly with Caine’s own (well publicised) attitudes to his place in this country’s film industry (who can forget his chippy collection of a BAFTA fellowship?).

John Barry’s score has a moody sense of cool that really helps to establish the tone of the film – its humour, its wry bitterness and its mystery thriller status. It’s an endlessly hummable series of refrains that perfectly matches up with the film’s part Third Man, part adventure fable structure. Sidney J Furie’s direction is very sharp and off-kilter, and he shoots many of the scenes as if from the perspective of an observer – the camera is positioned behind objects, or shots take place through cars or phone booths. Objects slightly obscure parts of shots. It gives us a constant feeling of being under surveillance. It increases the sense of tension and paranoia. And it makes the film look really distinctive.

If the film has a major flaw, it’s that its actual plot isn’t that strong. The reveal of the villain is made rather suddenly (and to be totally honest doesn’t really make a lot of sense). The plot line around the kidnap of the scientists is pretty unclear in both its intentions and the threat it poses to the country. The final sequence of Palmer captured and interrogated is a little underwhelming. The overall narrative never quite coalesces into something really compelling. But it somehow doesn’t quite matter, because the film is really a character study around a very cool leading character.

And it’s Caine himself who ends up carrying the movie. He’s a very different type of character. “What is he, some sort of fag?” producer Harry Saltzman apparently asked when he saw the sequence where Palmer gently cooks a proper meal for a potential girlfriend. Perhaps Palmer’s gently eyeing up of a number of women was added to counterbalance the fact that Caine plays him in this sequence as someone genuinely trying to form an emotional relationship. There are beats throughout of him as more Bond-style hero (he wakes up in his flat, and pulls a gun from the bedsheets, a visual slightly countered by the fact we’ve watched him make coffee and flick through the racing news). But really he’s a competent but slightly resentful professional, who knows he has hit a class-based glass ceiling.

The Ipcress File is a terrific movie, that looks unique and has a great soundtrack. It feels like a film that changed how heroes were perceived in British cinema – for all that films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had placed working class men at the centre of pictures, The Ipcress File not only made one a hero of a spy thriller, but did so while making him insubordinate and chippy rather than openly rebellious. Caine is quite superb in the lead role, and he never looked back after this – while Harry Palmer is surely a character who deserves some sort of place in a list of great film spies.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)


Chris Pine comes out from behind the desk to head into the field in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Chris Pine (Jack Ryan), Keira Knightley (Cathy Muller), Kevin Costner (Commander Thomas Harper), Kenneth Branagh (Viktor Cherevin), Len Kudrjawizki (Konstantin), Alec Utgoff (Aleksandr Borovsky), Peter Andersson (Dimitri Lemkov), Elena Velikanova (Katya), Nonso Anozie (Embee Deng), Colm Feore (Rob Behringer), Gemma Chan (Amy Chang), Mikhail Baryshnikov (Minister Sorkin)

Jack Ryan is the all-American, ordinary-analyst-turned-CIA Agent at the centre of the late Tom Clancy’s books. He’s been played by a range of actors, from Alec Baldwin to Ben Affleck via Harrison Ford, but his character remains the same – a boy scout, a man of principle and simple courage, pushed to do what must be done. He’s smart and quick-witted. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit was meant to serve as another reboot, to restart the Jack Ryan franchise after a mixed reception to Ben Affleck’s The Sum of All Fears. Sadly, it was another false start.

An origins story, it opens with Ryan (Chris Pine) studying at the LSE, before joining the marines in the wake of 9/11. He is critically injured in a helicopter crash, where he hauls two men from the wreckage while suffering from a broken back. Learning to walk again, he falls in love with Dr Cathy Muller (Kiera Knightley) and is recruited as a financial analyst by Thomas Harper (an effectively gruff but charismatic Kevin Costner) from the CIA’s Department of Making-Sure-We-Don’t-Get-Hit-Again (catchy name). Collecting financial intelligence while working as an auditor at a Wall Street firm, he notices some worrying financial deals from funds controlled by Russian tycoon Viktor Cherevin (Kenneth Branagh). Going to Moscow under the guise of auditing Cherevin, he and Cathy quickly find themselves embroiled in a dangerous terrorist conspiracy.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is decent fun. It’s also a rather impersonal and safe piece of film-making, that structurally and creatively feels like a 1990s action film reset in the 2010s. In a world of Jason Bourne, it genuinely feels a little old-fashioned and uninspired. It takes recognisable elements from dozens of action films and remixes them with a certain flair, but not a lot of imagination. It feels like the least “Branagh” film Branagh has directed, the camerawork being surprisingly restrained and contained considering his love of sweeping opera and dynamic, showy visuals.

But Jack Ryan is not a bad film, it’s just an enjoyably average one. It puts Ryan front-and-centre of the film, and Chris Pine really delivers in establishing Ryan’s old-fashioned principles of right and wrong, his sense of duty and his willingness to do what needs to be done when called. Pine also does a great job of demonstrating Ryan’s fear and panic as he finds himself increasingly out of his comfort zone – not least in a terrifying hotel bathroom brawl with an under-used Nonso Anonzie – in the aftermath of which he drops his mobile while trying to call for backup, and then can’t remember where the hell “Location Gamma” is when told to report there to meet a contact.

Of course, this incarnation of Ryan as an analyst rushed into the field doesn’t last, and the film succumbs from there to turning Ryan into an old-school action man, the sort of guy who drives cars at 85 mph through Moscow streets with ease, jumps on a motorbike and roars off in pursuit of a bomb with maverick self-assurance and takes on a trained assassin with a Die Hard-ish confidence. It’s a shame that the interesting character work of the first 2/3rd of the movie gets lost in the final third – but it’s another sign of the film delivering what it feels an action film should be rather than finding something unique and original.

At least Pine gets some good material to work with, which is more than can be said for Kiera Knightley. For all her American accent, this is Knightley at her most British Rose, her toothy, coy grin ever-present in every scene – and that’s about all she contributes. Not that this is entirely her fault, since Cathy is a character sketched on a fag packet, a successful doctor who obsessively worries that her husband is having an affair, making her feel weaker and needier than the filmmakers perhaps realise Later she exists to be a Damsel in Distress, and is then given a spurious involvement in identifying the villain’s target – which she identifies not because it is a medical facility she is familiar with, or perhaps somewhere she visited as a child or on a professional call-out, but solely because Her Man works there. (As if these CIA geniuses couldn’t work out that a financial terror attack on the US might be targeting Wall Street).

 

The villain’s plot is dully labyrinthine, but can be safely boiled down into having something to do with financial chicanery and a bombing attack, to destroy the US economy. Not that it really matters – it allows a suitable mix of booms, bangs and the sort of tense “breaking into the office to download the files against the clock” sequence that you’ve seen several times before. Kenneth Branagh cuts himself a bit short with Cherevin, a character who seems sinister but is really barely competent and hits every villain trope from pervy leering to executing an underling. We barely get any sense of his motivations or his background.

He’s also probably the only Russian nationalist in the world who is a Napoleon Bonaparte fan. Last time I checked, Napoleon was the enemy in the War of 1812 that redefined Russian history for the next 100 years. But then I’ve read a few Napoleonic era books, so I’m biased… This film clearly knows nothing about Bonaparte, with Ryan declaring at one point that the planned attack is “straight out of Napoleon’s playbook” – how Napoleon’s trademark fast movement and combined use of infantry and artillery, drilled to perfection, relates to a basic distraction strategy I don’t know but never mind. But then this is a dumb action film that name checks Napoleon because you’ve probably heard of him, rather than because it makes sense.

There is a lot to groan at, or say meh to, in Jack Ryan. But yet, I’ve seen it three times and it grows on me each time. Chris Pine is a very likeable screen presence, and the build-up of the film works well. Branagh directs it with a taut efficiency, even if it’s a film that lacks any real inspiration and feels like one for the money. But it presents its 1990s-style action beats with enough conviction and sense of fun that you kinda go with it. Yes it’s totally forgettable, but run with it and you’ll find yourself strangely charmed by it.