Taut, compelling political thriller, the sort of high brow stuff that never gets made into a big blockbuster anymore

Rating: 9/10 (4 July 2012)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Adapted from the John La Carre novels that were made into a TV mini series in the 70s, the film opens in the early 70s during the height of the cold war, where British Intelligence suspect a Russian spy has infiltraited their ranks. On a mission in Norway, Agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) is apparently killed after things don't work out as planned. Now, Control (John Hurt) has narrowed the suspect down to four people and has called in the assistance of recently ousted Intelligence Analyst George Smiley (Gary Oldman) to get to the bottom of the matter. But as he does, he finds everyone around him increasingly harder to trust.
In the heat of the recession era movie industry, where endless, soulless brain dead, big budget popcorn fodder the big movie execs know will rake in the big bucks is the only thing that gets shoved in our faces, it's even more dis-spiriting that here we have another re-make...but a re-make that is of the more high brow, intelligent, sophisticated end of the market, a cerebral political thriller that demands all your attention and makes it's pay off by gripping you right to the end. Given the average movie goer of this generation (me, anyway) has the attention span of an amoeba, given it's exposure to excessive advertising, popular culture and MTV, it may be a flick that will require two viewings in order to take it all in and pick up on stuff you may have missed the first time round, but if you can figure it all out on your first viewing more power to you.
Performances wise, Oldman does what he was born to do, naturally inhibiting the body and voice of an experienced, weary old political hack, whilst Hurt provides reliable support as the eccentric, campy man at the top and Strong raises his profile as the elusive, mysterious agent and that's not to mention support from the likes of Kathy Burke, Colin Firth and Stephen Graham, and with a line up like that you know you're on surefire ground.
Although it's not an original idea, it somehow remains a taut and compelling one that is as dynamic as it originally was (apparantly) and is an encouraging sight given all the meaningless, big budget drivel we have to endure nowadays. ****