When a terrorist escapes custody during a routine handover, Will Holloway must team with disgraced MI5 Intelligence Chief Harry Pearce to track him down before an imminent terrorist attack on London.
A decent, mid-list spy thriller, suspended somewhere between le Carré and Bond but with a budgetary austerity in keeping with UK government spending cuts that keeps it out of the real high-stakes game. However, it’s also a convincing argument that it’s time to start bestowing life achievement awards on Peter Firth.
It doesn’t exactly soar and the lack of levity grates, yet the Spooks movie still delivers some appealingly old-school mayhem to pass the time while we’re waiting on SPECTRE.
Honestly this is very enjoyable, but cinematically pedestrian, looking and feeling like a long TV episode.
The tighter constraints of a feature-film story arc expose the antics of the sneery, ennui-ridden, treachery-obsessed Brits – and it all looks a bit silly.
TV spies leap to the big screen at a ripping pace.
Alas those action set-pieces don’t add up to much either. By now, they all have third- or fourth-hand feel to them, the immediate post-9/11 climate of fear that infused the TV show having long since become the stuff of movie cliché.
For those who miss the TV show it is worth catching; especially for fans of Firth who delivers a strong, nuanced performance.
The plot is sub-Tinker, Tailor… and the action Bourne-lite, but the pace is brisk and fans of the TV show will not be disappointed.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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