The November Man Review
AARP James Bond just got real.
This is one of those annoying movies that I can’t really decide if I like it or not. I like writing reviews for films that really commit to being amazing or sucking like the Sarlacc. No one likes a fence sitter.
I guess it was OK. It was certainly better than the 36% it got on Rotten Tomatoes. I guess I enjoyed Peirce Brosnan although were I to give him career advice (as I sit in my crappy office in a warehouse who’s foundation is at least 8% rat excrement and the neighborhood compares favorable to a demilitarized zone but only just barely) it would be that maybe after doing James Bond the wise move would be to steer clear of spy movies. The story assumed I had an IQ bordering on triple digits and the girls in the film were gorgeous. The action was not grossly over the top but still managed to be well done and exciting. So why didn’t I love this film?
Honestly its because it is so formulaic. It’s like if movie scientists wanted to create a perfectly neutral spy movie as a baseline with which to compare all other spy movies good or bad to. It has all the obvious spy elements. (SPOILER ALERTS) A super spy who is betrayed by his government. An enemy who used to be his good friend. A villain who starts off as his friend but betrays him (and if you didn’t see it coming you must still be surprised when red traffic lights turn green). A hot girl in distress. A young girl in distress. A femme fatale. A murdered lover. A secret. A plot twist. Car chases, guns, knives, fights, and the day saved by one of the main guys remembering the value of friendship. With the weight of all the spy cliches packed into this plot I kept waiting for the film to collapse in on itself and create a spy movie quantum singularity.
In my last review I talked about how I am spending way too much time writing these reviews and I am going to stick to trying to get my point across in a few paragraphs rather than a doctoral thesis. However I believe I do need some kind of story recap so my goal it to encompass the entirely of the plot in as few words as possible. Here is my first attempt: Retired super spy is pulled in to save his Russian spy lover but she is killed by his ex-protege and he goes on a quest to do something (?) while discovering a dark secret about the Chechnyain war and the future president of Russia with the help of a hot chick while another hot chick assassin is trying to kill her. Guns, cell phones, interrogations, and the super spy’s daughter all turn up at various times, as well as a creepy rape scene and the hot chick transforming from helpless maiden to another super assassin overnight.
(Russian spy t-shirt from the Novelty T Shirt category)
So the good was some of the action, Peirce, some strip club nude scenes, the story, and Olga Kurylenko (my dream woman from Oblivion). I do appreciate a film director who understands that if you are going to feature a scene in a strip club you need to actually show some nudity. On the bad side pacing was sluggish, the movie felt like the writers picked up a huge bag of old spy cliches another studio was putting out in their trash dumpster and decided to recycle them one last time, at the end of the film you are kind of left with the thought that the main hero kind of screwed up the world, and the denouement didn’t so much as end with a crescendo as run out of gas and push itself to the credits.
Not bad. Way less work then I was doing a week ago. So is it worth seeing? Meh. I’ll say it’s not worth not seeing. In other words it is not worthy of any effort to actually see it beyond flipping a remote control but if your pot brownie happens to kick in just as you land on the channel showing it you won’t be making a mistake letting it run through. There is nothing in here clearly wrong with this film (aside from a couple of kind of boring scenes, including a luke warm sex scene between Luke Bracey and Eliza Taylor) but if you have watched five spy movies in your life you have seen this film in its entirety. Given a choice between this film and seeing Guardians of the Galaxy for the fourth time I might just go with Guardians. 1.5 out of 5 Phasers.
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