Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — 85/100

Rating: 8/10 (16 January 2012)

The consensus going round my movie-going friends is that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a big let-down, and that the acting alone is gives it the amount of worthiness requisite for you, the wary customer, to cough up nine dollars at the box-office. My assessment is slightly different (More about this in a bit.), but I actually have to agree with what my fellow movie-enthusiasts have said.
The plot is not terribly confusing, but the three of us who arrived roughly six minutes late after the trailers had somewhat of a difficult time figuring out what is what. Simply put, there is an English agency knee-deep in espionage (No surprise there.), and it is recently discovered that there is, and has been for some years now apparently, a mole among its constituents. Smiley (Gary Oldman) has a straight-forward task ahead of him: find the mole working with the Russians and get rid of him.
Plot aside, the biggest weakness Tinker has is its lack of tension. As one of my friends said, he was never "on the edge of his seat." Something like that is indispensable to spy movies: the story is well crafted, the characters are given enough definition, and the plot is there to fill your head with questions—and while it does, at the same it doesn't take you by the collar and rattle your brain. The climax was, like everybody else mentioned, a tad anti-climatic. The problem, I gather, is: while our characters are given sufficient definition, we never really have any emotional attachment to either. So come the big surprise, we're left with a paltry "Oh, okay?" response. This could have been easily fixed if, perhaps, the latter portion of the movie, or at least the content that is revealed therein, could have somehow been worked into the movie pre-revelation. In order for that to work, without spoiling the finale, the story would have had to examine the other constituents of the "Circus" in depth. This would throw us off in several tangents, but the upside to it all, of course, is we would learn so much more about a group whom we know so little. Esterhase gets a bit of this treatment his way, but by then I suppose it is too little too late. Despite this, the acting is tip-top quality. If you're in the mood for a low-key movie couched in superb performances, then Tinker will foot that bill.
As for me, being a rabid Colin Firth fan-boy made all the difference. While I can certainly see where everybody else was coming from, I certainly was "on the edge of my seat." Simply put: I did not want Haydon to be the mole! Sadly, a tincture of suspicious behavior coming from Haydon in key plot points that must have been placed there for some reason gave me every reason to believe that he was, in fact, the mole. Colin Firth, in my view, is the good guy in every movie. That's probably not the most flattering thing to say about such an accomplished actor, but I certainly can't help myself. I think he is a swell fellow, and for him to be ousted as the bad guy puts me in a very discomforting state. So, when the big secret was finally revealed, and while everybody was still recovering from a massive let-down, I on the other hand was screaming "Noooooo!" to the top of my figurative lungs and still asking the screen "Why? Why? Why!?" as the last minutes of Tinker were coming to an end.
Obviously, I had a different, and more rewarding, experience than my companions. None-the-less, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy boasts a superlative acting ensemble, a well-crafted plot, and—supposing you've the same estimate for Colin Firth as I do—an ending that is fitting and rather upsetting all at once.
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