"It doesn't matter what people think. You know what you did."

Rating: 4/10 (18 October 2015)

Spielberg knows what he did, but I have a few thoughts. Let's start with the title - You know, there's only one "spy" per se, who matters anyway. But it makes it sound like some thriller-diller, eh?
Now Tom Hanks - uh, what's with that incredibly furrowed, knit brow all through the story. Makeup Oscar time? Did they borrow it from a Klingon?
The woman who plays Donovan's wife? I know she's supposed to be convincingly all 1950s square - but really, heels and full lipstick all the time? Smiling at everything? At least they didn't plug in Jessica Chastain, that would not have been credible opposite Donovan's shlubby character. A performance as flat as one of those pancakes in the big American breakfast he never ate.
The youth are not at this movie, they're all out to see the latest vampire/zombie/Tom Cruise dreck. So the boomers out to see an ennobling patriotic drama have lived through all this, including "duck and cover" and the Missile Crisis. Do those of us who actually were terrorized and traumatized by all that really need pedantic little lessons about the bombs and the sirens, delivered by Donovan's delusional little genius son? I found it insulting.
Of course, all the Russians are scene-chewing geeky monsters, sometimes in such close-up we can see the beet-bits in their teeth.
Gosh, it was cold in that Cold War! So we have to see everyone blowing and wiping their noses, boogers hanging, in order to get the idea?
Exception: Mark Rylance, the only great thing about the movie. I've been watching Rylance in "Wolf Hall," and it's very impressive how he can create such a level of charismatic tension by hardly doing anything at all. He's all stillness, posture, little eye movements and gazes, all restrained, all coiled in. Amazing.
Back to the thriller at hand. So in the big spectacle scene where the U2 gets shot down, did Spielberg really need to show off, proving "Oh, I can do 'Gravity,' I can do 'The Walk'" just for bragging cred? And is it actually historically true that Powers gripped on to edge of his crumbling cockpit and just failed to hit the destruct button before his tether broke? (OH! is that a sneaky symbolic allusion to 'aborting' a mission?)
This whole thing could have been done as a 15-minute documentary (not that I'd like seeing another documentary) rather than puffed up into a dry and predictable "drama. When we see Hanks' character lying face down on his bed at home because he's so beat, I suppose if I were him I'd be concerned to hide my face for having accepted another such stereotypical heroic individual little man role.
Do nasty CIA agents really skip into the air in peevish excitement like an 11-year old when they get frustrated? (Oh, they probably do.)
It might have been more exciting to get into a row with the dopey woman in the seats behind us who kept aggravating my wife by kneeing and bumping the back of her seat - but "Would it help?"
So the Coen brothers helped write this. I guess Spielberg thought it might be more tasty to shmear some funky mustard on this baloney sandwich, but "Would it help?" My fantasy is that the Coens were often snickering up their sleeves.