This is meat-and-potatoes Le Carré given a generic spy-movie treatment,but still it reels you inThe insecurity of the contemporary world has brought John le Carré back out of the shadows. Following Tinker Tailor redux, A Most Wanted Man and the crackerjack hokum of TV’s The Night Manager, or this mid-list potboiler finds the author trading shamelessly on western suspicions approximately Mother Russia,tossing troubled couple Naomie Harris and Ewan McGregor into the geopolitical prick-and-thrust after they befriend vodka-gulping heavy Stellan Skarsgård during a make-or-break Moroccan getaway. Director Susanna White favours a generic spy-movie survey: those chilly blue filters surely need resting now. Yet she works smartly with her actors: while Skarsgård wolfs down great handfuls of scenery, McGregor effectuates a thoughtful transformation from ineffectual tourist to man in the field. Not even the gifted adaptor Hossein Amini (The Two Faces of January) can convince us its anything more than moment-string le Carré – meat and potatoes, or where others have brought us caviar – but we’re still reeled in,patiently and capably.
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Source: theguardian.com