An ex-CIA operative is brought back in on a very personal mission and finds himself pitted against his former pupil in a deadly game involving high level CIA officials and the Russian president-elect.
Director : Roger Donaldson
Writers : Michael Finch , Karl Gajdusek (screenplay)
Stars : Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko
Peter Devereaux is a former CIA agent who is asked by the man he worked for to extract a woman who is in Russia and is presently close to a man running for President, who is believed to have committed crimes during the Chechen war. She can give them the name of someone who can prove it. His friend says that she will only come to him. So he goes and she gets the info and tries to get out but the man finds out and tries to stop her. Peter arrives and saves her but as they are getting away they're shot at. She is killed but tells Peter the name before she dies. Peter kills the men who attacked them but when he sees the leader, Mason, a man he trained, he realizes the CIA is involved. He tries to find the person and the only one who might know where she is is Alice Fournier, the social worker who helped her when she came to the West. A CIA bigwig steps in and orders that Devereaux be taken off the case and wants Mason to take care of it. The Presidential candidate sends an assassin to .
Reviews
the year was 1974 and a hard-bitten journalist named Bill Granger decided to follow the trend and write yet another spy novel about a hard-bitten secret agent caught in a web of deceit. This was after all the peak of the cold war and spy themes dominated fiction, film, TV, even cartoons.
As it turned it, the November Man was well received and a number were written in the series before it finally fizzled. Critics of the day felt all were considerably above average. Granger had a knack for hard prose because of his background.
Flash forward about a quarter-century and you will find an ex-Bond lead with money in his pocket looking for projects he can continue working in, even if the process involves spending some of his own money to catch the plum roles. Which he accomplishes by buying the rights to one of the later books in the Granger Series and re-naming the project after the very first book in the series .. see? And so kind reader here we are in 2014 with a project written in the late 20th century, upgraded on a shoestring, mis-named, and spawned with the sole intention of giving its greying star a payday.
What can possibly go wrong? Just about everything. I will point out, for the record, and for skeptics, that it is possible to make something new and wonderful out of something old and dusty -- look at the Bourne Trilogy. (Which I have seen about six times, each).
But that is not what is happening here. Bereft of talent, we have a weak script that constantly stumbles over the material it is adapting, direction so lacklustre that even the action scenes appear to be in slow-motion, and a star who might just as well have phoned it in.
Brosnan never, not once, connects with his character. At best, you have an ageing Bondish character who appears to have landed in the wrong movie. And, if the central character cannot find motivation ... how can the audience?
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