This espionage thriller from the director of Generation Kill is taut and stylist but a feeble human factor lets it down
With the irresistible force of a hurtling bowling ball, the great Stellan Skarsgård scatters everyone - friend or foe - like skittles in this handsome-looking Le Carré adaptation from Generation Kill director Susanna White. He plays Dima, a great bear of a man who tries to go clear when his job as a kingpin money launderer for the Russian Mafia endangers him and his brood of a family.
Stellan Skarsgård is a force of nature as Dima
Quite by chance, he meets innocents abroad - Ewan McGregor as emasculated poetry professor Perry and his estranged wife, Gail, Naomie Harris as a fast-rising lawyer. Dima befriends them with his force of nature charisma and entrusts them with a vital USB for the British Secret Service. With their help, he hopes to buy his way into a new future for himself and his family in the UK.
Damien Lewis as the nattily-dressed MI6 man, Hector
Our Kind of Traitor may seem like it will demand more of a suspension of disbelief than your average spy thriller. However, Mica, albeit with a friendly face, is a very real-life facilitator of the very real-life Oligarchs who are flooding London with dirty money. For Perry, his foolhardy mission could be a way of rekindling his relationship with Gail following his indiscretions with a student.
Click on the video links to watch our interviews with Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård, and director Susanna White
After the huge success of The Night Manager and the 2011 movie adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy a new generation is savouring Le Carré’s elegant work on the big and small screen and Our Kind of Traitor takes a very mass appeal approach. The regulation spooks in suits are here and Damien Lewis is very watchable as Hector, a MI6 handler with a thin smile and a nice line in waistcoats. However, the Mafia foot soldiers and consigliores come straight from central casting.
A fine bromance: McGregor as wimpy poetry professor Perry is drawn to Dima
Director Susanna White doesn’t stint on quality action scenes and the locations (including the now compulsory spy flick shoot-out in a snowbound wilderness) are exotic. Ambivalence and ambiguity is the lingua franca and good points are made about Britain’s murky morality in the face of international financial skullduggery.
But it’s the human factor that lets things down and McGregor and Harris are never quite convincing. Best to sit back and admire Skarsgård as the marauding Russian bear with the heart of gold in a dirty, dirty world.
Alan Corr
