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.
I’ve never watched Spooks (the series) so I am writing this review based on the movie itself and nothing else. I liked this, it had a great pace to it, enough twists and turns to keep it interesting and it seemed to understand London and how it should be seen on screen. I think the fact that the opening scene shows us London’s impressive skyline while it’s pissing with rain tells you that they can depict London exactly as it is.
The film briefly detours to Berlin as well, I guess to offer some international European flavour but it doesn’t stay there very long. Kit Harrington is a great choice for the co-central role and his backstory with one-time mentor Harry Pearce is explained well without feeling like a load of exposition that’s trying to explain what happened in the 37 series of spooks that have gone before.
There are some nice action scenes but nothing of Mission Impossible scale, although Kit does scale a London tower block with some ease, not quite the same as hanging off the world’s tallest building a la Tom Cruise…
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy-light is a good brief description, but this also pulls in elements of Bond and the Bourne series (n fact more than once Peter Firth looks a lot like an ageing Daniel Craig). There’s an exploration of spying practices, the usefulness of these older institutions like MI5 and how loyal one should be to one’s country, but nothing that can’t be brushed to the side if you prefer to use this as pop-corn fodder.
