What a waste of talent

Rating: 2/10 (23 December 2018)

Okay as I promised I would start positive regardless of the films worth, so what is good in this film.
The cast.
The talent on screen is triple A all the way and they make the best of the scenes they are in. Gary Oldman is Smily all the way and hes now on the hunt, all of the cast definitely give their all...
But
The story is a mess, Its easy to tell the story when its a book or TV mini series but the makers of this flick flat out failed to tell a story.
I mean it there is no overall story here!
The situation is that there is a double agent in British Intelligence and Smily is tasked with finding the mole. There are four suspects code named Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Spy...
but
of the suspects we only ever see the one suspect and the others are hardly there, so suspense is kind of out the window. Even if you haven't read the book or seen the TV series its obvious who the mole is.
In just over 120 minutes it is difficult to cover the four suspects equally if at all and this is aggravated by the director shoving in his favourite scenes from the book despite the fact that these scenes add nothing but confusion to the story as there is no time for any context or cause and effect.
As I said at the start the actors are great and are the only good thing here but as great as the individual scenes are practically non of them flow in a coherent manner. You have a great scene but there is no cause or affect here, its like a bigger film just had a random number of scenes cut out and then stuck together.
With a film limited to 120 minutes some things have to be dropped from the source (in film-making its called "killing your babies") and this wasn't done, they wanted every thing and thus ended up with a mess.
I must mention the thing you cannot ignore which is the Tribble perched on poor Benedict Cumberbatch's head pretending to be hair. Seriously it looks like a cross between a mop and a small bail of straw. All of his excellent acting ability was wasted as you are gut laughing at the Monty Python sketch perched on his head. I mean this, people in the theatre where laughing at him as he looked utterly pantomime every time you saw him everyone was just laughing.
Well whoever made this pigs breakfast needs to learn at least some discipline, considering the talent on screen this should have been way better, its like a bad film school project and its a fail!