Film / Reviews
The November Man
The November Man (15)
USA 2014 108 mins Dir: Roger Donaldson Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Bill Smitrovich
The wise oldster/green young protégé duo, a retired spy lured back into action, important blokes shouting at grainy real-time surveillance screens in a distant location, a cat’n’mouse chase in the crowded streets of somewhere in Foreignland where bystanders are expendable, shifty looking good guys who turn out – shock! – to be bad guys, a hero who finds he can trust nobody, the gratuitous naked lady shower scene, the innocent child in peril . . . have they missed anything? I suspect not. ‘The November Man’ is no more than an assemblage of every espionage movie cliche you’ve ever seen, with an unappetising garnish of misogyny and a lazy – or offensive, if you’re going to get all liberal soapboxy about it – attempt to co-opt a real conflict as a backdrop for some fairly preposterous plotting. On the plus side, it stars Pierce Brosnan, who remains the most talented and versatile former Bond, and for whom this was clearly tailored as a Bourne-style makeover, blending high-tech (drones, tracking devices, cunning tricks with SIM cards) with low-rent (car chases, shootouts, someone getting hit in the face with a shovel).
Brosnan’s an aging CIA agent who’s retired to Switzerland after the mandatory tragedy on duty. But a film about an old Bond getting paunchy in a tax haven is unlikely to set the box office alight, so he’s reactivated to extract a fellow spook from a dodgy situation in Moscow. This places him in the line of fire of his former protégé Luke Bracey, whom he instructed pointedly in the pre-credits sequence never to form personal attachments. Can you see where this is going yet? Running about and shooting ensues, as each side taunts the other and the string-pullers pursue initially opaque agendas. Eventually, our hero hooks up with Olga Kurylenko (amusingly a Bond girl of post-Brosnan vintage), who has info that could scupper the presidential ambitions of a dodgy general responsible for committing atrocities during the Second Chechen War.
As you’d expect of The Bank Job and Thirteen Days director Roger Donaldson, this is all staged efficiently enough and succeeds in entertaining even as it gets increasingly ridiculous, although there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen dozens of times already. Presumably to distance himself from that Other Role, Brosnan’s character is swearier and nastier than 007, though carving up a woman with a knife merely to make a tactical point to his opponent is a misjudgement from which the film never fully recovers.
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