Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy review

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15, 127 mins)

Director: Tomas Alfredson 

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ 

John Le Carre’s 1974 espionage novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set among the big players in the British Intelligence Service, met with great success when it was made into a 1979 television adaptation starring Alec Guinness.

Retaining the 70s setting, this big screen updating begins with Mark Strong’s spy sent to Budapest by John Hurt’s controller to meet the person who knows the identity of the double agent working for the Russians who holds a powerful position within British intelligence.

But he gets himself shot, and in flashback the blanks are filled in as George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is brought out of retirement to find, as Hurt says, the mole right at the top of the circus. He’s known to be one of several high ranking agents, among them Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds and Toby Jones, who have been designated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and so on.

When this is good it can be very good, and it’s such an overwhelmingly strong group of actors that the attention is held even when events on screen are, shall we say, minimalist. And what’s best about it are the performances, none more so than Oldman, who for the first 15 minutes or so of the film, doesn’t say a word.

Everything is in his body language, his gestures and glances, and though when he does finally speak there’s a hint that he’s doing a Guinness impression, it’s certainly not a distraction from a riveting portrayal.

Subtlety is the key in everything here, but as a consequence it suffers as a thriller, lacking the flair and cinematic pizzazz that may have been expected from the director of Let the Right One In. It’s full of interesting conversations and enigmatic phrases, but so deliberately paced that patience can be tested, and as far removed from a typical spy caper as you can get.

It’s more of a museum piece than a thriller, a stuffy parade of dull, shabby little men in grey suits, dedicated to paperwork and one-upmanship, largely focussing on how empty and pathetic their lives have become. But as the layers of the puzzle are added, it does gain traction and grips steadily without ever coming close to actually providing any excitement.

Green Lantern review

Green Lantern (12A, 114 mins)
Director: Martin Campbell

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Comic books heroes have been treated fairly well at the movies so far this summer, but this adaptation of the DC property has to be viewed as a backwards step. It begins with a cosmically silly prologue telling us all about the Green Lantern corps, an intergalactic peacekeeping force whose mystical green rings give them the power to do almost anything.

When one of their number is critically injured while battling a super-foe, he makes his way to earth to use the ring to choose the next Lantern. This turns out to be Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds), a hotshot test pilot, whose cocky, reckless nature at first seems at odds with the stoicism of the other 3599 Lanterns, but it’s nothing a training montage can’t fix.

So with the Lantern home planet and earth under threat from the extremely powerful super-baddie, as well as Peter Sarsgaard’s scientist-turned-telekinetic-freakshow, Hal must overcome his human fears and weaknesses and save the day.

On the one hand, there’s not much to actively dislike about Green Lantern. It’s not aggressively stupid, just colossally goofy, with its endless references to the green power of will and the yellow power of fear, and as mythologies go it’s fairly out there.

Most accountable is the one-note script that spends an hour on the most cliched, cheesiest setup imaginable, all dead fathers and flimsy motivations, followed by a sustained burst of passable action. It does look good and the special effects are solid, but it’s just too puerile to be engaging, though the ever-likeable Reynolds does his best, and too reminiscent of kid-friendly chores like Fantastic Four to come close to the more mature and satisfying adventures of recent years.