Tedious - Like watching a snail scurry along a garden path.

Rating: Null/10 (22 January 2012)

It was the Bourne Identity without any action, suspense, drama, plot or scenery. To say it was glacially slow would show glaciers in a bad light. A glacier would speed past this movie and wave as it went by. It is as obscure as "Lost in Translation" and as filled with action as a Bambi cartoon is filled with pornography. To say the plot had twists and turns would be hard as there was no discernible plot. There was a nice view of Istanbul for a few seconds. The rest was dingy squalid offices, At one point one fellow was sitting on a couch and he said something innocuous and another fellow inexplicably launched into him and smacked his head around. The other people in the room barely raised an eyebrow at this outburst and the two protagonists continued for the rest of the movie as if nothing had happened. I think the assaulted fellow was as confused as I was, but he at least didn't have to sit through two hours of wishing his eyes would glue themselves shut. The film opened with an action sequence. which since it was one of the few times in the movie something actually happened, the director milked it by repeating chunks of it inexplicably through the movie. The film also had a strange effect on the nature of time. It didn't matter how many times I looked at my watch, the movie still had an hour to go. "Drab" doesn't adequately describe it. For sometime I thought the film was being shot in sepia, then the director let a slip of sky get past his defences. For this to be described as 'drab' it would need Carmen Miranda to waltz in every other scene and do the tropics dance complete with a banana fruit salad hat. The token woman wasn't all that ugly but for her to have contributed something to the film, they would have had to give her some dialogue. What absolutely stunned me was the bit in the end credits when le Carré was given credit for Co-Executive Producer (i.e. he put up some of the money) This means that le Carré had at the very least approved of the general direction of the movie. And although general direction would imply moving from one place to another in some sort of linear motion, not the actual direction of swirling round and round till it finally disappeared down the plug hole of boredom.