Review: A Most Wanted Man

A Most Wanted Man
Cert: 15 / 122 mins / Dir. Anton Corbijn




Another mixed bag of style and substance from the pen of Le Carré, A Most Wanted Man has plenty of individually great moments, but left me struggling to say I'd enjoyed the film. Much like the last outing from the stable, the film doesn't waste a line of needless exposition where a shot of a central character sighing and staring at a wall for forty five seconds will do instead.

Luckily, the plot - following a German black-ops anti-terrorist organisation monitoring the recruitment and funding of extremist Islamist terror cells - is fairly linear this time (and despite my gripe in the previous paragraph, it's nowhere near as infuriatingly self-indulgent as TTSS), but while the story is pleasingly interwoven, some of the performances - as excellent as they are - seem over-egged, somehow. I can't decide whether it's Corbijn's direction or Andrew Bovell's screenplay, but something was holding me back from feeling any real connection to the characters.

A relatively straightforward spy-tale, handled as if it's more baffling than it actually is, A Most Wanted Man seems like it would benefit from being a TV series, rather than the two hours of furtive looks and scowling we get here. Luckily, Philip Seymour Hoffman's interpretation of German spymaster, Günther Bachmann, seems to have him hailing from Swansea; so that never gets dull.

It's along those lines, yeah.



For the most part, I think I did.



Probably, but that's not my call to make.



Home or cinema; either should work.



I won't.



At some point.



Didn't hear one.

How come when Annabel is cycling through the park, all the leaves are green and on the trees, but the shot that's intercut features Günther standing in a different area (not in that park, admittedly) among brown leaves all over the path? Visual symbolism or a sloppy shooting schedule?

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