Film Review - The November Man

Out in The Cold

Film: The November Man

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Olga Kurylenko

Directed by: Roger Donaldson

Duration: 1 hr 48 mins

Rating: * *

After playing the most popular spy in cinema, Pierce Brosnan returns to play a CIA agent in The November Man. Unfortunately, it is an eminently forgettable venture and you might want to go home and watch Brosnan as Bond or Remington Steele to undo the effects of this enterprise. While it is not a dreadful film, it surely is quite lame and gets progressively worse.

Based on the novel There Are No Spies it borrows from all spy thrillers but the concoction doesn’t blend well. It opens with a shootout, Peter Devereaux (Brosnan) and his protégé David (Luke Bracey) are in the middle of an assassination attempt when the latter disobeys an order which results in a death of an innocent boy.    

Fast forward a few years later, Peter has retired but he forceful circumstances push him  in the thick of action again, this time in Russia where he has to protect an informant who turns out to his ex.  But it doesn’t go according to plan, she gets killed and the CIA is now gunning for his head with the protégé now in charge of eliminating him.

The plot thickens further as Alice (Olga Kurylenko, the Bond girl from Quantum of Solace), a social worker has some vital information about the prospective Russian president. 

There are too many cooks involved in this broth and the film keeps cutting from one to the other. There is Peter, Alice then David and his girlfriend, the to-be Russian president, the current boss of CIA Wenstein, Peter’s former boss Hanley who is arrested by the CIA – there are too many side stories here and the focus keeps shifting.

It’s not even clear what relationship Alice and Peter share. In one scene they are discussing their future course of action and in the next, she wakes up in his bed and you are not quite sure what happened in between, not that it would make a world of difference but it would be good know nevertheless. It would at least prove that the story is progressing sequentially.

The direction and the screenplay is inconsistent, it is as if both of them gave up in the latter half of the film. Brosnan who worked with Donaldson in Dante’s Peak has been there done that when it comes to his performance.

A word about the censor board - even though the film has an adult certificate, swear words are beeped out and a couple of cuts also look abrupt.  Now one can understand if it is a consistent policy not to allow swear words but then it is permitted some films and beeped out in others. The answer to this is certainly not blowing in the wind. 

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