I saw the tweet yesterday from Cinema 21 that there was a new movie premiered at some of their cinemas. I looked through a bit of the info that it was a spy movie which could be interesting and the main character was played by none other than Kit Harrington, well known as Jon Snow from Game of Thrones TV series. It may not be a major blockbuster movie, but it certainly nice to see a different movie in theaters especially with most of them still showing Spider-man: Homecoming. So let us get on with the movie then.
Brief Story Line
A joint forces of MI-5 unit and CIA were tasked to do a transfer of high value terrorist leader named Adem Qasim (Elyes Gabel - Scorpion TV series) to USA. Things went awfully wrong with the escape of Qasim, so the head of the operation Harry Pearce (Peter Firth - Mighty Joe Young) were put to blame by the Director General Mace (Tim McInnerny) and Deputy Director Geraldine (Jennifer Ehle - Zero Dark Thirty, Fifty Shades of Grey etc). Harry Pearce was forced to early retirement but he later went off grid to try and find Qasim by himself.
Mace and Geraldine tried to find Harry as they believed it would lead to the capture of Qasim who had targeted London for his next major attack. To do so, they enlisted the help from Will Holloway (Kit Harrington - Pompeii, Game of Thrones etc) a former MI-5 agent who had been released from duty by Harry few years ago.
At first Will was reluctant but with some convincing done by Mace, he finally agreed to help them. He started to look for clues from June Keaton (Tuppence Middleton - Jupiter Ascending) the MI-5 officer on duty during the escape. With her help and from other MI-5 officers as well, Will started slowly uncovering the hidden plot surrounding the escape of Qasim and had to race against time to re-capture Qasim before he was able to engage his dangerous plan.
End of Brief Story Line
Well, this movie was not too bad in term of its plot. There were few surprises through out the movie and there were the occasional spy-ish matters like having hidden plots, twists and so on, but do not expect major spy like James Bond in British movies. This is more like Stratton or Unlocked which were both British movies. However, if we compared to those movies, this one actually lacked the suspense. There were few moments that we were amazed by the thrill, though there were some scenes where we were quite shocked of the incidents like it came out of nowhere. It kind of having slow pace most of the times.
Apart from the few thrilling scenes, the movie itself was supposed to be giving us lot of surprises but again this one was pretty lacking. The action sequence were not a lot but it was pretty good at the end. I loved the sound effects which was surprisingly quite amazing especially during the gunshots or explosions sounds. There were no dramatic emotional moments in this movie though there was 1 moment involving Qasim (which I think played brilliantly by Elyes Gabel and a completely different character than the genius Walter O'Brien he portrayed in Scorpion) that gave us quite a shock.
I understand that this movie was actually a movie version of the British series Spooks which ran from 2002 to 2011 (10 seasons) with the primary lead character Harry Pearce (played by Peter Firth too). In this movie, they tried to shift the focus on another lead character Will who seemed to be like a protege of Harry, but unfortunately the character was written not really intelligent (there was more than 1 scene which showed how green he was for a supposedly great agent). However, in term of action scenes, I think Kit Harrington was more than adequate to do so, probably due to his experience in Game of Thrones (those who watched that series would know what I meant).
As a stand alone movie, this movie was far from a great spy movie, but I am sure that fans of the series would enjoy this one a lot as there were few characters from the series who also appeared in this one. However, from a pure "outside spectators" like my wife and I, we could not appreciate those characters since we did not know them.
So in conclusion, if you are looking for a British spy movie and if you are interested in seeing Kit Harrington playing a spy, then you can see this one. But if you want to see major spy movie with lots of gadgets and actions, then it is better to see James Bond movies. And I personally think that the tagline in the movie poster was too exaggerated. This movie is certainly not the caliber of Mission: Impossible or Jason Bourne movies.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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