Our Kind of Traitor

Dir: Susanna White

2016

**

Susanna White's adaptation of John le Carré's well received 2010 thriller is quite the disappointment, and for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, Susanna White is great television director but I don't think her talents are suited to the big screen. Our Kind of Traitor felt like a big TV movie or a thriller series that had been rushed and cut to ribbons. Secondly, Ewan McGregor and Naomie Harris are both brilliant actors but neither of them suit their characters. Harris is okay but doesn't have much to work with while McGregor is never convincing and doesn't look particularly enthusiastic about it either. I love Stellan Skarsgård but his Russian mobster is pretty cartoonish and Damian Lewis's MI6 officer is about as far from George Smiley as you can get. In the novel, Ewan McGregor's Professor Perry is approached by Skarsgård's Dima because he is mistaken for a British Spy with the hope that if he isn't one, he knows one. Indeed, in the novel he does know one and it works. In the film, Perry is asked to simply go to MI6 when he returns home after his holiday and hand over a message, like it's the easiest thing in the world. The novel is thrilling, mysterious and somewhere between le Carré and Alfred Hitchcock. The film is an unbelievable mess of pointless actions and ridiculous re-writes. Who re-writes John le Carré? le Carré did act as executive producer and had a brief cameo but I'm not sure what, if any input he had on the production, if he did I couldn't see it. The party scenes looked good, there was beautiful scenery and overall the film looked sleek but it just had no depth to it, no thrill or mystery. Early scenes of a Russian mafia hit were wonderfully intense but it all just went down-hill from there. I saw it yesterday but I just know that it will become a forgotten experience as it was so uninteresting, so middle of the road and just so absurd. It is a woeful imitation of John le Carré adaptation that misses all of the author’s greatness and misunderstands what makes a great thriller so great. The original story is relatively simple but there is a lot you could do with it, it is baffling how they could have got it so wrong and that le Carré himself let them do it. I just hope everyone got paid handsomely for their time.