Review: Our Kind of Traitor

Our Kind of Traitor
Cert: 15 / 108 mins / Dir. Susanna White / Trailer



Ah, what could be better for the lunchtime film-slot than catching up with Obi-Wan, Monneypenny and Bootstrap Bill? Perhaps only doing it at the ear-splitting volume normally reserved for crap horror movies? (That's your call, Cineworld, but it's not like there's mumbled dialogue to make up for in this film)

So, director Susanna White manages to do what Tomas Alfredson apparently couldn't all those years ago, and brings a John Le Carré thriller to the big screen without it being a complete, stilted mess. And at no point is a tent-based live entertainment facility identified in the script as having a Talpidae-infestation in its uppermost reaches…

University lecturer Perry (Ewan McGregor), his barrister wife Gail (Naomi Harris), Russian Mafia informant Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) and British Intelligence operative Hector (Damian Lewis) lead the story of corruption and money laundering through Marrakech, London, Paris and Bern, in a surprisingly tense thriller that never feels over-egged, somehow.

Harris, Skarsgård and Lewis are fantastic as the core characters for the film, sometimes leaving Ewan McGregor struggling to keep up. He struggles well, but you can see the strain. Meanwhile, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle comes through his desaturated colour-palette and subdued lighting, and manages to conjure reflections and lens-flare as if by magic. It's a striking combination, but it works well. Visually, the film is definitely glossier than a made-for-TV thriller, but its content wouldn't be out of place at 9pm on a Sunday evening*¹ (although this says more about the quality of modern TV than it does about cinema, admittedly).

With its 108 minute runtime, the film rolls at a very measured pace, with White neither rushing nor dawdling, allowing the plot to unfurl organically. And there's little-to-none of the double-cross twists you'd expect of the genre, if only because the audience don't fully trust any of the characters to begin with.

The film may not pick up too many awards (or even that much recognition), but Our Kind of Traitor is an example of a film succeeding in a genre which should be more than overcrowded by now. An intelligent thriller which never feels it has to be needlessly confusing or obscure in its storytelling.
Come for the writing; stay for the performances.

And massive props go to screenwriter Hossein Amini, who gives Mark Gatiss the best acerbic (and utterly deadpan) quip of the film with "…I don't like the c**t any more than you do". Unless your name is Guy Ritchie, you do not drop a line like that lightly.

The second-best dialogue exchange comes in a car-scene, as Stellan opens his shirt to Ewan, revealing a chest inked in symbolic mafia ephemera. "Do you know what this is?", he asks, pointing to an illustration over his solar plexus. "Is it a clearly fake tattoo…", Ewan replies, "…drawn on less than ten minutes ago in blue felt-tips by the work-experience kid who's heard of Russian Mafia tats, but has never seen one?".
Stellan looks out of the window awkwardly as the scene fades to black…

It's more A Most Wanted Man than Tinker, Tailor.
To its credit.



Only if you want to appreciate the cinematography on a massive screen.



It does.



Not best, but deserving of a place on the CV, certainly.



Nope.



Nope.



Level 1: Obi-Wan Kenobi's in this.





*¹ Although it's also worth pointing out that director Susanna White has helmed relatively few cinematic features, but has a lot of solid TV work under her belt.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: The Sweeney

CAUTION: Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.



The Sweeney
112 mins / Dir. Nick Love

"What would it take. For you. To have sex. With Ray Winstone? Oh, and in a pub toilet? Yes, yes, I know you played the female-lead in Captain America, we saw you in that and that's why we want you to be in The Sweeney. But that thing we asked you about just now, it's kind of a deal-breaker. It is the deal, in fact. And yes, he'll be walking around in his pants."

I won't lie to you, I fucking well enjoyed The Sweeney. As gritty as it tries to be (and the number of shootouts in public places with civilian casualties is alarmingly plausible), there's a layer of slickness that's constantly pulling the film away from reality. Armed robberies and gunfights with middle-aged men haven't seemed quite this cool outside of a Guy Ritchie flick*¹. The main difference here, of course, is that we're seeing it all from the point-of-view of the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad - not that we get to see any of the paperwork being done; being in the Sweeney means putting your feet up on the desk or fiddling with your phone with your hood up. And this is indicative of a larger phenomena, whereby loose-ends seems to get conveniently ignored with few or no questions being asked. But this movie is told firmly from Jack Regan (Winstone)'s POV, and that is how his character manages his career, much to the annoyance of his superiors, so it seems strangely fitting.

Now I know this film won't be for everyone. It's pretty much The Ultimate Ray Winstone Vehicle™, where he gets to play the part he's constantly acting out in his head anyway, and the rest of the cast follow suit by not wasting time making their characters appear likeable or anything. So y'know, you're either on their side or you're not. I was, and so I thoroughly enjoyed just under two hours of shooting, swearing, drinking, crashing geezers. There is some amount of substance, but style definitely has the greater share.
Plantagenet Beaumont puts in a good turn as Regan's protege, George Carter, and again is almost inexplicably amiable as a young, cocky, surly misanthrope-in-training. Damian Lewis and Steven Mackintosh pop up regularly as their put-upon bosses trying to keep them on the right-side of the law, and apart from the aforementioned Hayley Atwell, everyone else is pretty much window dressing (including the villains). So again, it fits perfectly with Regan's point-of-view on the world. Oh, and if you're going to put Alan Ford (Brick Top from Snatch) in there as Regan's connection to the cockney underworld, wouldn't you use him a bit more?

The Sweeney's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be. Entertainment is all that's required, and it excels at that. As with a couple of other films this year, this would make an excellent jumping-off point for a TV series, if they were going to reboot it for the small screen. Then again, the TV version wouldn't be able to incorporate lines like Carter's…

"…but you didn't count on one thing… me, you cahnt."

Like I said: not for everyone. And how many other films have you seen whose finale is a car chase and shootout at at static-caravan park in Gravesend?

The Sweeney is all mouth and all trousers.

*¹ On a violence-related note, I'm not entirely sure why the BBFC have classified this as a Cert.15, while Dredd gets the Cert.18 treatment. There are plenty of 'meaty' head-shots in Dredd, and a few cuss-words, but it's in a clearly-defined fantasy setting, and the violence and language on display in The Sweeney far outweighs it, and in an environment we see on the news every day.

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.

• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.