THE NOVEMBER MAN
DIRECTOR: Roger Donaldson
CAST: Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracy, Olga Kurylenko, Bill Patton, Bill Smitrovich, Eliza Taylor
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LSV
RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes
RATNG: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
THE twisty plot may be stock spy thriller potboiler stuff, but the well-crafted, old-school action sequences in The November Man make up for a lot.
It also helps that Pierce Brosnan plays lead, Peter Devereaux, the vaguely cynical, totally ruthless, beautifully be-suited assassin.
Brosnan could do this role on auto-pilot, but he manages to be present in the role, not dialling it in as he could be tempted to.
He is world-weary and you want to know how he is going to handle being betrayed, because he is a rounded character with desires and ambitions, not just a cliché like most of the other characters.
Devereaux is dubbed The November Man by his spook colleagues because like winter, once he has been through a room, everything is dead. (Yes, there’s a series of books, though those were mostly set in the Cold War era and the film is very contemporary).
A successful assassin, Devereaux walked away from the job but is brought back by the CIA to bring a spy in from the cold.
Once things go pear-shaped on the job, it is just a quick hop and low jump to murder and mayhem.
The CIA used to be the good guys in the film world, but now days they are just as likely to be the bad guys in Hollywood. But, they are still the go-to guys when you need a reason for Yanks to be running around a city with guns, leaving behind bodies and blood.
The November Man plays out like an old-school spy thriller, so if you know those beats you can tell where it is going. There’s hand-held camera work for the solid action sequences – mostly these are dribbled out, instead of smooshing them together in large set pieces and that helps keep the pace going – plus some graphic close-up work of nasty violence.
Devereaux is pitted against an old pupil, David Mason (Bracy) who learnt all the tricks of the trade from the master, and now has to hunt him down.
There is a power showdown playing out within the CIA between the old guard represented by Devereaux’s old friends, John Hanley (Smitrovich) and Perry Weinstein (Patton) versus the younger guard represented by the junior agent Celia of no surname (Caterina Scorsone) and Mason.
So this is a fight between old-school hands-on guys and younger digital wave tech-heads who are as likely to be girls as guys.
It is all centred on finding a woman who may have incriminating evidence against a possibly corrupt politician.
Olga Kurylenko plays Alice, a social worker who knows where to find the missing woman. Kurylenko plays a normal, non-spy person forced to rely on Devereaux to protect her and there are some interesting-looking characters wandering through the film, but ultimately it relies too much on the obvious route out.
The plotholes get left dangling, logic got left at the starting post, women are things to be acted up and these spies wouldn’t survive a day in the real world.
But, this is Hollywood so check in your reality specs at the door.
If you liked The Equalizer, you will like this.