Image: Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris in Our Kind of Traitor photograph courtesy StudioCanal.
Leaving the cinema, one of the audience members said quietly to a friend, ‘Ewan McGregor must owe someone money.’ All things considered, they were probably a little harsh, but Our Kind of Traitor is no cinematic triumph. No-one goes to see a spy movie seeking gritty realism or in-depth social commentary. You go looking for intrigue, suspense, chilling villains and a killer twist but even on this scale, Our Kind of Traitor’s achievements are middling.
With John Le Carre, we’re happy to let go of a need for realism in exchange for excitement and the kind of over-the-top, unlikely story lines that only celluloid can offer but when that entertainment is lacking, the flaws become stark. Even by spy movie standards, the film’s plot was far-fetched and hard to accept. A promising opening sequence quickly gave way to the twist of fate that brings the everyman protagonist into the web of intrigue but it was clumsy at best. When a charismatic Russian stranger invites you, a professor of poetics, to first drink $23,000 bottles of wine and then to join him at an exclusive party while you’re on holiday in Morocco, you should be anything but surprised when he turns out to be more than just a generous stranger. You should be even less surprised, when it turns out that there is something illicit going on. The only thing that should come as a surprise is when he suddenly places his life in your hands, in a manner that would suggest that you are at least capable of handling yourself in his world.
But this crazy chain of events is the premise of the film and it is not the last sequence that leaves you, as an audience member, feeling somewhat patronised. To be fair, Le Carre’s books are known for the meticulous manner in which their plots are constructed but it seems Our Kind of Traitor is let down by a sub-par adaptation. There are a number of serious plot holes and passages of dialogue that verge on parody in terms of their plausibility and adherence to cliché.
The performances are inconsistent with few standouts. Ewan McGregor is solid but not more and the usually skilled Stellan Skarsgard offers a Russian accent that is deplorable for someone of his stature. The addition of Naomi Harris, who played Eve Moneypenny in the most recent James Bond films, offers a touch of class and spy pedigree but she, like most of the other characters, has little depth. By far the worst offender is Damian Lewis, whose character is so stereotypically toff that one half expected him to don a bowler hat and wax lyrical about the empire (which he almost did). The villains lacked any real menace and failed to inspire the hate that makes the ‘bad guys’ in this genre the welcome surrogates for the world’s problems.
There is a small part of all of us that hopes to stray, for a moment, into the hidden world of intrigue that we suspect courses beneath our ordinary and comfortable lives. We’d all like to become the unexpected hero and discover some latest strength of character that we believe dwells inside us. Once actualised, we’d like to return to our ordinary lives unscathed. That’s what spy movies offer us and when done well like The Constant Gardiner or even A Most Wanted Man, they can give us just that. With Our Kind of Traitor the return to mundane reality is an equally welcome one, albeit for very different reasons.
Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Directed by Susanna White
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Stellan Skarsgård, Naomie Harris and Damian Lewi
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