Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ** (2011, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Kathy Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Graham, Mark Strong) – Classic Movie Review 6111

Director Tomas Alfredson’s cinema remake of the brilliant 1979 Alec Guinness TV mini-series is an adequate watch but plodding, clunky and rushed, with the pacing and atmosphere all wrong. It lacks the needed high level of tension and compulsion.

Despite being Oscar nominated for Best Performance by an Actor, Gary Oldman is basically miscast and rather struggling as espionage veteran George Smiley, forced out of retirement to uncover a Soviet Agent in MI6. The identity of the MI6 mole villain is all too obvious, and this is symptomatic of the film’s general lack of subtlety and success.

Swedish director Alfredson turns in a professional, crafted piece of work, but has little real feel for the UK in early 1970s, the Cold War, the British Intelligence service, and this very British project.

Also in the cast are Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Kathy Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong and Stephen Graham. Good though they may normally be, the actors here all seem like pygmies compared with those in the TV original. And longish though the running time may be for a feature at 122 minutes, the TV show’s seven-episode format at 315 minutes had the time to do John le Carré’s big, complex novel full justice.

The novel is based on the uncovering of the Cambridge Five KGB mole traitors in the 1950s and 1960s. It is the first book in le Carré’s Karla trilogy, followed by The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979).

Tomas Alfredson is the maker of Let the Right One In (2008), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and The Snowman (2017).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6111

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com