BEFORE: Pierce Brosnan turned up rather unexpectedly in a documentary late last year - it turns out he started his career playing low-level gangsters in British films. Now he's back and his more recent films are going to get me almost all the way to a full weekend of Mother's Day-themed films. Which reminds me that I should really buy a card today and get it in the mail.
Will Patton carries over one more time from "Minari".
THE PLOT: An ex-C.I.A. operative is brought back in on a very personal mission and finds himself pitted against his former pupil in a deadly game involving high-level C.I.A. officials and the Russian president-elect.
AFTER: I'm always up for a good double-cross or triple-cross film, but this one is borderline ridiculous, as if some screenwriter made a bet over how many reversals he could get into one film. There are so many times that the allegiances change, or THIS agent pulls a fast one on THAT agent that I really had to question who was working with whom. Seriously, at some point the agents who are on THE SAME SIDE don't appear to have the same goals in mind, so how can you envision that they're, you know, working together?
This extends to the main plotline, which suggests that there are some deep, deep flaws in the way the storyline is structured. Devereaux is the veteran agent who gets pulled back in, after being retired for five years. Mason is his former protegé, who, we later found, got a less-than-glowing Yelp review from Devereaux, who recommended that he be dropped from the program because he couldn't follow orders. OK, but then WHY is Mason still working for the C.I.A.? You'd think they would listen to a veteran agent and drop him as a result of that review. It's just one more thing added to the pile of ways in which this group of agents is failing to function together as a group - is that why the world remains so messed up?
Five years after an operation went south because Mason couldn't (or wouldn't) follow orders, Devereaux's old boss, Hanley, tracks him down and gives him information that brings him back in - a hit-woman (female assassin) is making her way through the ranks, killing every agent she can find, and Natalia Ulanova, an agent Devereaux has, well, a personal connection with, is currently on a mission, so she's in jeopardy. Devereaux appears on the scene, surprising everyone but the audience, in the middle of Natalia's mission to drive her to safety - but Mason's in place with the sniper rifle, and even though Devereaux knows the car is in Mason's sights, he keeps driving forward into danger - well, it's not like he can turn the wheel and steer the car, or maybe make a u-turn, that would be ridiculous, right?
It's also weird that Mason didn't know that Devereaux and Ulanova were involved, and it's also weird that he was in position to kill one of the C.I.A.'s undercover agents as she was escaping from danger. Doesn't anybody know how to play this game? Doesn't the middle letter in C.I.A. stand for "Intelligence"? Couldn't anybody figure out that killing Ulanova would set off a whole chain of events that would put Devereaux at odds with the other agents? More to the point, if she's escaping danger with valuable information that the agency needs, why shoot her? It just doesn't make any sense, no matter how you look at it.
But it's not really about her, it's about the guy who's in the running to be "elected" as Russia's next president. Umm, you know that they don't really have free elections in Russia, right? Those are totally rigged, right? Putin won the last election with about 125% of the popular vote. And yet there doesn't seem to be much that the U.N. or anybody else can do about it. It's funny how much trouble has been caused in the U.S. just by certain parties insinuating that the 2020 election was stolen, but in Russia every election in the last 40 years has most likely been fixed, and nobody's doing anything about that. How is THAT fair?
The Russian candidate who's running unopposed here is Arkady Federov, who's guilty of war crimes during the Second Chechen War - you'd think that would make him an unlikely candidate, but in Russia, that's just the sort of thing that beefs up a candidate's resumé, I guess. Anyway, the information that Ulanova was carrying was the name of the refugee who was his sexual plaything for many years, and pretended to be mute while she was secretly listening to everything he said and therefore knows all about his war crimes. This is another little sticking point, the screenwriter doesn't seem to know the difference between "deaf" and "mute" - just because she was pretending to not be able to speak, that didn't mean she couldn't HEAR things and, you know, maybe write them down.
Anyway, the hunt is then on to find this Mila Filipova, who would be able to confirm that the bombing of the Russian embassy was a "false flag" conspiracy, the Russians blew up their own building to blame it on the Chechens (Chechnyans?) and thus take over their oil fields, or something. This is the only part of the film that seems to make sense, because if you just replace "Chechnya" with "Ukraine" then this film seems very prescient - how many lies about Ukraine did Putin tell to justify the recent invasion?
But then the film goes back to Devereaux vs. Mason, trainer vs. trainee, master vs. protegé, and so it descends into ridiculous overkill once more. Mason falls for the woman who lives across the hall, which goes against how Devereaux trained him, and so Devereaux has to threaten her, just to teach Mason a lesson? That seems like more overkill - maybe Mason's just got a different way of doing things. Maybe Devereaux's got some issues, or was looking for a little payback because of what Mason did to his girlfriend, but either way, two wrongs don't make a right.
Jesus, what's the end game here? Is the goal to discredit Fedorov as a candidate, or instill him as the Russian President but put the squeeze on him to get Russia to join NATO? The C.I.A. seems to be working all angles against the middle, so guys, can we please just all get on the same page here? Fedorov getting elected is good, Fedorov getting elected is bad, could you please just make up your minds? Nope, there are still 7 or 8 more reversals to go before the end of the film. Really, about halfway through I found that I couldn't determine which way was up after all the shifting alliances, and I wondered if it was even worth it to keep track any more. There's just no way that real spy work is this complicated.
It's worth noting that the source novel is "There Are No Spies", and it's the seventh book in the "November Man" series. The plan at one point was to film a sequel, "December's Child", and please note for the record that to date, that has not happened.
Also starring Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Luke Bracey (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Black Widow"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Amila Terzimehic, Lazar Ristovski (last seen in "Casino Royale"), Mediha Musliovic, Eliza Taylor, Caterina Scorsone (last seen in "Edge of Darkness"), Akie Kotabe, Patrick Kennedy (last seen in "Einstein and Eddington"), Dragan Marinkovic (last seen in "Behind Enemy Lines"), Ben Willens, Milos Timotijevic, Tara Jerosimovic, Nina Mrdja
RATING: 4 out of 10 exploding vans
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