Fantastic cast but awful script, screenplay and directing

Rating: 4/10 (27 October 2011)

Overall, I had the impression that plot had given way to a poor (and clichéd) attempt at an 'art' film in which sadly it also failed miserably. Let me state I was not expecting an action spy movie. I was expecting a more real, perhaps even plodding film where slowly Smiley works out who is the mole within 'the Circus'. Sadly we had a film littered with redundant (and pretty meaningless) scenes; at times it jumped around and it certainly over used flashbacks - some are important and some could have added so much more to developing/understanding the characters but somehow they failed; overall it was shot in a gloomy and dull way and in addition the film (and possibly sound) quality was poor - I had thought that perhaps the cinema were using a bad copy or had a projector issue but having read similar comments from other reviewers I begin to wonder. My suspicion is that all these devices were attempts at conveying the gloomy, boring, seedy, mysterious world of spying in the 1970s. To a point that may be fine but instead (and laboriously) they took over the film. With its superb cast and intriguing story this film could have been great. But one gained little insight about the characters who thus ended up one dimensional. And the story got lost. I do not know if I fell asleep at times and missed vital clues but it seemed as though important points (eg how did Smiley find Prideaux?) were skipped over as was most of the real painstaking work (showing someone rubbing their eyes after reading documents all night is simply not adequate). The only decent performance was by Benedict Cumberbatch as Guillam. The rest were stifled I suspect by a poor script and poorer directing. In conclusion what should have been an intriguing film where the mystery is 'who is the mole' simply left one thinking it was a mystery as to why they had bothered making the film.