Product: Tailor of Panama [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 4.0
The Tailor has a few tricks up his sleeve
If you are expecting a dark, nervous spy thriller, you'd better look elsewhere. But if you are in the mood for something a little out of the ordinary, something darkly humourous, then you may enjoy Tailor of Panama as much as I did.The director, John Boorman, directed Deliverance, and also Excalibur, the Year of Living Dangerously and Zardoz (a futuristic film with Sean Connery in a red loin cloth and a large flying stone head.) So you can see that Boorman can be a bit, well, unusual. In The Tailor of Panama, he takes us for quite a ride.Brosnan plays Andy Osnard, a disgraced spy with a penchant for other men's wives. This peccadillo is gracefully overlooked by the higher-ups until he oversteps himself and goes after another man's mistress. MUCH worse, so Osnard is exiled to crummy Panama, where everthing is for sale and nothing is the real goods. He meets Harry Pendel, ably played by Geoffrey Rush, a tailor to the powerbrokers and ex-con. Osnard drags the hapless tailor into a web of espionage and blackmail. But Pendel has a few tricks up his sleeve.The cast is excellent, and the filming adds an interesting surreal tone by careful control of the lighting. If you are in the mood for something a little different in the spy genre, you might enjoy The Tailor of Panama.