The November Man

Shouldn't that be a dumpster on fire?

Grade: C +

Director: Roger Donaldson

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko, Bill Smitrovich, Amila Terzimehic, Eliza Taylor and Will Patton

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 48 min.

The November Man is better than most, if not all of Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond efforts. Unfortunately, clearing that low hurdle isn’t much of an accomplishment.

Adapted from Bill Granger’s spy thriller novel “There Are No Spies,” the film boasts Brosnan, a venerable actor seemingly primed for a resurgence, and Roger Donaldson, a director well-suited to the genre with such credits as No Way Out, Thirteen Days, and The Bank Job. The two previously worked together in the volcano disaster flick Dante’s Peak.

Sadly, this prestige veneer covers an unstable foundation built upon an unnecessarily convoluted plot, cut-rate supporting cast and misogynistic undertow.

Peter Devereaux (Brosnan) is a skilled ex-CIA agent lured out of semi-retirement in Switzerland for professional and personal reasons to protect Alice (Olga Kurylenko), a relief worker filled with valuable and dangerous information … information you’ll tie your brain into a pretzel wondering why she didn’t share with the world far before the events in this film.

It’s all about CIA black ops in league with Russian nerdowells to once trigger a Czechian rebellion. So, there’s a Russian politician with a hidden past (Lazar Ristovski), duplicitous CIA minders (Bill Smitrovich and Will Patton) and a skilled but sexy female assassin (Amila Terzimehic).

The film aims to explicate the psychology of spies and machinations of geopolitics. But it utterly muddles the latter while failing to flesh out the former. Unending diatribes about international power and politics end up sounding like hollow filler. Meanwhile, the overly twisty plot smacks of a screenwriter weaned on a steady diet of John le Carré novels.

Devereaux is also chased by David Mason (Luke Bracey, lifeless), his estranged former CIA protégé. Devereaux calls Mason “the best friend I ever I had” at one point, which conflicts with every other scene in the film suggesting Devereaux never cared much for Mason personally or professionally. It’s much like all the characterizations in the film, which are described instead of being developed.

At one point, Devereaux slashes the femoral artery of a woman close to Mason, ostensibly to teach Mason another lesson about the dangers of letting human ties interfere with your secret agent status (a lesson we discover Devereaux ignored himself). It’s a wholly unnecessary scene, and we never hear from the hapless lady again after she’s carted to the hospital. She’s but one casualty of the film’s disposable, if not outright antagonistic attitude toward women, who are constantly couched as mere objects for abuse, derision and sexual conquest.

It’d be nice to see The November Man as the James Bond film Donaldson never got to make, cast with a former 007 and Bond Girl (Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace) looking to rectify past misfires. Unfortunately, the film is the cinematic equivalent of jogging on a treadmill—it raises your pulse, but ultimately it doesn’t go anywhere.

The Ghost Writer

Investigating a possible war criminal?
There's an app for that.

Grade: A –

Director: Roman Polanski

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkerson, and Olivia Williams

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Roman Polanski continues to use the silver screen to both explicate and exorcise his personal demons. From surviving Nazi persecution as a child in the Kraków ghetto to the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family to his conviction – and subsequent flight from sentencing – for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski’s real-life travails have informed and defined his film oeuvre.

Reportedly, Polanski had to complete editing of The Ghost Writer from the confines of a jail cell and then under house arrest at his Swiss chalet as he fights extradition back to the United States. In his grand return to the modern thriller (his first since 1988’s Frantic), a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), finds himself living as a virtual exile in a foreign land, partly to escape prosecution for legitimate charges nonetheless brought in a kangaroo court by accusers with duplicitous motives. Sound familiar? There is a lot more than a Napoleon complex going on in Polanski’s mind when Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), compares her husband’s hermetic life on a windswept patch of Martha’s Vineyard to Bonaparte’s banishment to the island of St. Helena.

That other unique and proverbial Polanski archetype – the inquisitive, self-assured loner who foolhardily believes he has a grasp on matters that are actually well beyond his comprehension – comes in the form of a nameless author credited as “The Ghost” (Ewan McGregor), hired as a replacement ghostwriter for Lang’s memoirs after the original scribe met an untimely death.

Lang is under investigation for sanctioning war crimes while in office, chiefly acts of rendition against terrorist suspects, and this premise propels the ghostwriter’s eventual efforts to connect the dots between his predecessor’s demise and the high-stakes political intrigue at play. It is worth comparing Polanski’s use of current events to Green Zone, Paul Greengrass’ polemical Iraq War actioner. Greengrass created fictitious characters and a plot whose unrealized purpose was to elucidate its real-life backdrop. By contrast, Polanski shrewdly exploits a topical controversy solely to service a fictional storyline, in the same way the real battle over water rights in California was mere window-dressing for the personal mystery and psychological drama at the center of Polanski’s Chinatown.

The Ghost Writer thrives on atmospherics, artistry, and acting. Polanski’s skills as a visual virtuoso remain in fine form. He brackets Ghost Writer with silent images portending unseen deaths – the first a shot of an abandoned car sitting alone on a ferry boat intercut with a body washed ashore bobbing in the surf; the last the sublime sight of hundreds of pieces of paper gradually being blown into view as they progressively litter a city street. In between, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Harris – adapting his own novel, The Ghost – fashion a plot that is both morose and pulpy. Accented by Alexandre Desplat’s haunting, orchestral score, Polanski constructs set pieces so tense and finely tuned that they would be labeled “Hitchcockian” if this was any other director.

McGregor reclaims much of his lost luster, ably supplying his role with the right blend of self-assuredness and vulnerability. Brosnan plays Lang as a cross between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, while Williams is mesmerizing as the emotionally bruised but politically savvy first lady (shades of Hilary?). There are also sharp supporting turns from Kim Cattrall as Lang’s longtime assistant (and perhaps more), Timothy Hutton, James Belushi, Eli Wallach, and Tom Wilkinson as one of Lang’s shadowy acquaintances.

But the real star is Polanski. Whatever his personal travails, he remains a master filmmaker. And, neo-noirs like The Ghost Writer are not only his distinctive wheelhouse, but also a welcome throwback to clever, taut political-conspiracy thrillers. This is the old stuff…this is the good stuff.

Neil Morris

Remember Me

If you're a good actor, then I'm James Bond

Grade: D +

Director: Allen Coulter

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Emile de Ravin, Pierce Brosnan, and Chris Cooper

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Remember Me ought to be titled Remember James Dean. In this dour effort to prove Robert Pattinson can act, nomadic TV director Allen Coulter concocts a post-modern rip-off of Rebel Without a Cause, starring Pattinson doing his best/worst Dean impersonation to play Tyler Hawkins, an emotionally troubled rich-kid with daddy issues who subsists on a diet of beer and cigarettes and sporadically attends NYU when not part-timing at the local bookstore.

The film opens in 1991 when young Ally Craig (Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) watches her mother get gunned down on a New York City subway platform by a street hoodlum. Ten years later (note the time…note the place), Ally lives at home, attends college, and enjoys an uneasy relationship with her cop father, Neil (Chris Cooper, struggling with his New Yawk accent).

After Neil arrests and roughs-up Tyler, he decides to date his daughter as some half-witted measure of revenge. Naturally, before long Tyler is cooking Ally dinner, Ally is wearing Tyler’s sweats, and the two are splashing each other with water and exchanging inane bon mots: “I have a coaster if you’d like a coaster.” “Sorry, I don’t do coasters until the third date.”

We have no idea why Tyler’s business mogul father (Pierce Brosnan) is so estranged from his children or his ex-wife. Or why Tyler’s kid sister (Ruby Jerins) is bullied by the girls in school. Or why his sister getting her hair shorn by those mean girls proves the miraculous balm that heals every deep-seated dysfunction afflicting these annoying, self-absorbed cretins. Or why Pattinson and de Ravin are unable to exude even a modicum of acting acumen or romantic chemistry.

But, nothing explains the risible plot twist – one of the most tasteless since The Boy in The Striped Pajamas – that manages to run roughshod over a storyline that means so little to begin with. Remember Me? I’d rather not.

Neil Morris

Mamma Mia!

The Golden Oldie Girls

Grade: C –

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgärd, Christine Baranski, and Julie Waters

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

If you feel the need to tap your toes to ABBA’s greatest hits, plug in your iPod. If you have a hankering for a faded jukebox musical, trek to the Great White Way and buy a ticket to the Winter Garden Theater. Otherwise, the film adaptation of Catherine Johnson’s long-running stage production Mamma Mia!, based on ABBA’s songbook, is a shrill, garish pop-opera that uneasily treads the line between show-stopping and surreal.

On the eve of her wedding, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) tries to identify her father by inviting the three likely candidates to the seaside Greek villa run by her mother and erstwhile flower-child rocker, Donna (Meryl Streep): Sam (Pierce Brosnan) is a wealthy, New York architect; Harry (Colin Firth) is a vaguely gay London banker; and Bill (Stellan Skarsgärd) is a wandering free spirit. As Donna’s middle-aged gal-pals/former backup singers, the braying, fun-loving Rosie (Julie Waters) plays like the fifth Golden Girl while thrice-divorced Tanya (Christine Baranski) releases her inner cougar on the native island boys.

The end result is Gidget viewed through the prism of a Bob Fosse fever-dream. Director Phyllida Lloyd, a veteran of the British theatre, fashions her feature film debut into a poorly paced, oddly drab affair that resembles a tedious, 1970s B-musical (even though the film is set in 1999). Most of the filming took place on the lots of England’s Pinewoods Studios, and there are abundant, obvious green-screened scenes. Moreover, while the ABBA ditties carry infectious beats, the lyrics are shoehorned into the narrative and do nothing to develop either characters or plot.

During its few blessed quiet moments, Streep flashes a dash of much-needed acting acumen. The rest is all histrionics and caterwauling – I’d rather hear a Ringo Starr revue than one more intonation from Brosnan. “Take a chance on me?” If it’s Mamma Mia! asking, no thanks.

Neil Morris