The Emperor's New Clothes

Rating: Null/10 (24 October 2011)

As the title suggests, I feel it can only be a case of the Emperor's New Clothes when reviewers commend this as a classic and brilliant film. In a discussion with a friend of mine I was also treated to the same rhetoric when I disagreed - that I must be some kind of unintelligent heathen who only likes simple action films. Not so, unfortunately. Rather, I just spent the last two hours being bored to within an inch of my life. Only because I thought there must be something coming that justified said glowing reviews did I not leave the theatre, but it turned out to be as bad a decision as going in there in the first place.
The film setting is pretty much the most dismal and dreary image of 1970's England imaginable. Everything is brown or grey, dirty and uninspiring, as if looking through the eyes of a severely depressed individual. We are treated to endless scenes of characters simply moving from one dreary location to another, and then sitting there not speaking. Smiley, whilst brilliantly acted by Oldman, seems incapable of responding to any dialog without first a 30 second pause of suspended animation. The majority of the rest of the characters comprised a bunch of sour, rude and miserable old men, none of which I developed even the slightest compassion for.
The basic story of the film is the discovery of a mole in MI6, except that since MI6 appeared to consist of the most miserable human beings on the planet then really, who cares if they find the mole or not? In fact, why not leave the mole there since he's the only thing that's even vaguely interesting. The mole is, of course, finally uncovered in a scene that typifies the film: another brown room, two miserable old men not speaking and not moving.
Cinematography also seems to be another buzzword to use here, so let's address it. To be fair, some nice use of the camera does add a modicum of style, but it's nothing that hasn't been done before, and if anything it's overused to the point where it gets in the way of the film and becomes tiresome.
It's not that there aren't some good points, there are. There are a few well done scenes, the acting is good, and the younger characters do infuse some life into the plot. However, unfortunately these islands of relief are few and far between, and the result was two and a bit of the most dreary and uninspiring hours of my life.