Our Kind of Traitor ***½ (2016, Ewan McGregor, Damian Lewis, Naomie Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, Jeremy Northam) – Movie Review

Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris star as a weary long-term British couple, Perry Makepeace and Gail Perkins, who go on a rekindling romance-type holiday in Marrakech and meet dodgy Russian Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). Dima asks Perry to party with him and challenges him to a game of tennis. It turns out Dima is a member of the Russian Mafia, whose new boss, The Prince (Grigoriy Dobrygin), wants him and his family dead. Dima has a plan – he wants Perry to take a memory stick back to London and hand it over to MI6 for him.

Enter Hector of the British Secret Service, played hammily and extravagantly by Damian Lewis, who still manages to do a lot of weird eye acting submerged in a huge pair of glasses. Nevertheless, Lewis gets it right, and that’s just as well, because here is a lot of him in the movie. And in many ways he’s the making of the film, though his performance wouldn’t really work if McGregor and Harris didn’t keep theirs low key and naturalistic, and if Skarsgård wasn’t giving a performance somewhere in between. 

Skarsgård’s is a showy turn too, but he nails it, and the film needs it. Skarsgård is a classy actor, and the film needs him. Among the rest of the cast, there’s a tiny bit of space for Jeremy Northam as dodgy politician Aubrey Longrigg. He’s good and it’s a shame there isn’t more screen time for him here.

Anyway, the Brit couple agree to help out Dima even more by returning to meet him in Paris, whence he plans to defect with the help of loose cannon Hector of the British Secret Service. It will come as no surprise that the Brits are caught in the cross-current of the Russian Mafia and the British Secret Service, and, with their lives in danger, they have no one to trust.

In this film version John le Carré’s novel seems to be offering quite a slice of hokum and be just an airport-read potboiler, though maybe the novel is a classy potboiler. The screenplay by Hossein Amini, who last year wrote and directed the film of Patricia HIghsmith’s The Two Faces of January, works efficiently and rather well, but it lacks class. Attempts to strap on class by having characters mention serious matters about the appalling state of the world, bad banks, bad politician, bad countries, just seem like that – strapped on, and lacking any fresh insight or profundity.

That’s not to say that Our Kind of Traitor is not involving and entertaining. It is. There are many twists and turns in the plot, but they all follow a familiar, tried-and-trusted pattern, so there are no real surprises for spy thriller buffs. But it’s entirely enjoyable following all the leads to the expected destination.

Director Susanna White, known for Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (2010), tries to impose some style on the film, but it ends up just being a bit murky and fussy visually, when some cool, classic film-making style would be better.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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