And to try to locate him, the outfit recalls an agent from Moscow: Will Holloway (Harington) is a young hot-head whose relationship with Harry has the distrust and flux of a troubled father-son bond. After he flubs the jihadi’s escape, Harry Pearce becomes the spy who goes out into the cold, disappearing underground in an attempt to find out who in MI-5 betrayed his operation. Whatever the reason, the remainder of the movie centers on two characters. Is it to appeal to American viewers? Or to intimate that Britain’s intelligence services really are second-rate? Or could it be a correlative for the filmmakers’ sense that Hollywood is better at this kind of moviemaking than they are? (“ The Americans will crucify us,” frets one MI-5 officer.) It’s interesting to wonder why this is so. mentioned repeatedly during the scene, often in terms suggesting that the guys across the Atlantic are superiors rather than co-equals. The rescued jihadi is a CIA prisoner the Brits are simply transporting him to their Yankee counterparts. Can you imagine an American film in which a high-value prisoner’s captivity would be at risk due to a simple traffic jam? And would the cream of the nation’s intelligence service be shown as so completely impotent and inept that they can’t even get agents to the scene during the crime?įunny thing is, though this is not at all a satire (or at least not obviously so), that very comparison seems to be on the filmmakers’ minds. There’s something, well, almost comically British about this opener. The man in charge, Sir Harry Pearce ( Peter Firth, a veteran of the TV show), gives the order to release the prisoner in order to prevent a bloodbath among ambient civilians. The film kicks off with a rather stereotypical action set-piece that cuts between two main locations: stuck in traffic during a rain storm, a high-security van carrying an important American jihadi is attacked by gun-wielding motorcyclists, who free the prisoner and create mayhem before speeding off back in the MI-5 subcommand center, agents and their superiors watch this attack via a bevy of security cameras but find themselves unable to thwart it. The answers supplied by Bharat Nalluri, one of the TV show’s original directors, and his collaborators are pretty much what you’d expect: super-widescreen format, lots of panoramic wide shots (especially from helicopters), big action scenes, and a story capacious enough to encompass roles for a number of reputable character actors plus a lead part for one hot young TV-into-film star, “Games of Thrones”’ Kit Harington (who has been bruited as a potential replacement for Daniel Craig as 007).
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