Such is the wit, energy and sheer cinematic flair with which The Tailor of Panama is brought to the screen that the only note of regret it prompts is that John Boorman hasn't made more movies. If You Can , Boorman refreshes the jaded and dated genre that is the spy movie with a rare vitality, a droll sense of humour and a deep streak of cynicism in The Tailor of Panama , his sophisticated and highly entertaining treatment of John Le Carr 's novel.
Nobody is quite what they seem in the film.
In richly ironic casting that keenly subverts his James Bond image, Pierce Brosnan plays a cunning, self-obsessed MI6 spy, Andy Osnard, whose sexual excesses in Madrid lead to him being banished to Panama. A compulsive liar, he is an utter chameleon in his shameless eagerness to appease others. As Le Carr acknowledges, the character is not far removed from the vaccum cleaner salesman recruited as a spy in Graham Greene's equally sardonic Our Man in Havana . In a variation on her True Lies role, in which her character believed her spy husband was a dull salesman, Jamie Lee Curtis plays the patient wife of the fantasising Pendel. Harold Pinter has a cameo as Pendel's late uncle and mentor whose ghost pops up to proffer advice.