Not the thriller it wants to be

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2016)

Why would Stephen Spielberg want to make Bridge of Spies, a Cold War spy thriller, when there's already plenty of better movies out there, like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the original Manchurian Candidate, The Lives of Others, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or even The Third Man? The answer seems that Spielberg is using Bridge of Spies to draw thinly-veiled allusions to the modern War on Terror and enemy combatants, with warnings about xenophobia, government propaganda, and global hyper-nationalism.
Bridge of Spies is engrossing and Mark Rylance is especially good as a dispassionate pawn, seemingly apathetic to every part of life and every person, except he has a deep respect for people who get knocked down and stand up again. However, the movie is simply good, not the great movie it wants to be. It lacks the necessary noir and suspense, two aspects hard to achieve in color.
We get a legal procedural followed by some low-intensity negotiation and some minor history lessons. Our hero, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), also plays a manipulated pawn, but he has a few tricks up his sleeve because he's compassionate and thoughtful and impervious to propaganda. Information is key, and thus also secrets, so we must keep secrets about lies and lies about secrets (insert modern discussion of cryptography here). Eventually, no one knows who is zooming whom.
We have the Rule of Law, which so often breaks down to the Rule of Man, because people write laws and choose whether and how to enforce them. America wants to show off it is better than evil police states, but the lesson here is maybe that's all we do. We simply show off we are better without the actual moral higher ground.
Maybe Mario Puzo wrote it best in The Godfather: "The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun."