Dull and boring.

Rating: 3/10 (22 October 2015)

This movie is long, stagy, pretentious and boring. The acting is hammy, and the characters are drab and inspire little interest. The tension should have been gripping. Instead it is absent. The ending of movie is already known and is anti-climatic. The movie seems to suggest that Abel was not treated fairly and downplays the seriousness of his crimes and the sinister nature of his work. The treatment of Francis Gary Powers is completely superficial, which makes the story even weaker. For an audience not familiar with the history surrounding Abel and Powers, this movie will not make any sense at all. This movie contains no heroes, heroines, no damsels in distress, none of the stock characters and situations usually employed to give a story some substance. Instead, the movie just plods along to its foregone conclusion. Why would any movie maker find such bland characters worthy of a movie? The real story is how the Soviets managed to shoot down an American spy plane flying at 70,000 feet. How the Soviets were able to detect and target a U2 flying at that altitude is not explained, nor is the huge political fallout caused by the Powers debacle even mentioned. Indeed, the names of Eisenhower and Khrushchev are absent, yet in the actual event they were the key players, and by leaving them out, there's no story.