I want two hours of my life back

Rating: 3/10 (2 April 2012)

I must admit, I haven't read the book, and this must be part of why I've been so baffled by this movie and by all the glowing reviews.
Pacing is glacial. People walking in and out of buildings. People getting into cars. People staring into the camera without blinking. Shots of stacks of papers slowly transported from one floor to another by a special paperwork elevator. On multiple occasions. I'm not kidding.
If there's one thing that redeems the slow pacing, it's the fact that, without all these pauses (allowing you to try to figure out what's happening), the movie would've been incomprehensible to the point of being completely unwatchable. The director does not really bother trying to explain what's going on. Characters are dropped in the middle of the movie without any preparatory work or attempt to explain who and what they are. The movie randomly switches from the present time to flashbacks, without any effort to differentiate between them visually or even to mark transitions.
The whole plot of the movie is basically about uncovering a Soviet mole in the "Circus", or the British Intelligence, among a group of 4 high-ranking officials. (This last part, by the way, you don't get to learn until at least halfway through the movie. Until that point, it's just vague references to a mole somewhere in the organization.) Aside from the fact that the four are played by different actors (and one of them is banging protagonist's wife), the four are thoroughly unremarkable and lack any distinguishing features. If I remember correctly, two of them never even appear on screen except in group meetings.
You don't even get enough information to associate faces with names. I've managed to figure out 30 min into the movie that Gary Oldman was "Smiley", only because he was mentioned so often. I wasn't sure who or what "Alleline" was until well into the second half.
There are two sub-plots, involving an incident in Budapest and an incident in Istanbul. The Budapest subplot is thoroughly perplexing because most of the things happening as part of that subplot make no sense, and, ultimately, the whole subplot turns out to be virtually disconnected from the main story line (except in the beginning - where the main character of the subplot is betrayed by the mole) and to lead to nowhere. For example, the character of Bill Roach appears on screen on at least three occasions but I can't find any reason why he was part of the movie at all. I got the feeling that the sub-plot must have been somehow important in the book and the director couldn't dispose of it completely, but ended up butchering it enough to lose all meaning.
This all merely begins to scratch the surface. If I were to list all the things that make no sense or were inserted into the movie for no apparent purpose (except maybe to serve as artistic sketches, objets d'art, so to say), I'd run way over the 1000 word limit. I should stop here.