Over the past few years, the cinemas have been full of great adaptations of John le Carré’s spy novels. Fernando Meirelles and Ralph Fiennes did justice to The Constant Gardener. Anton Corbijn and Philip Seymour Hoffman excelled with A Most Wanted Man. And Tomas Alfredson and Gary Oldman surpassed them both with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Our Kind of Traitor is cut from different cloth.
That is not due to the plot or the screenplay, which insinuates connections between Russian organised crime and the British establishment. We can’t say a bad word about Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography or the performances either. Ewan McGregor is admirably humble as a literature professor who decides to deal with his marriage crisis by immersing himself in a spy case. After a poor beginning, Stellan Skarsgård steals the show. The fly in the ointment is that we’ve seen almost every scene before. There are no exciting (visual) ideas and the tension arc is only so-so. Better than most TV detective series, but that is not so difficult.
OUR KIND OF TRAITOR
UK, 2016, dir.: Susanna White, act.: Ewan McGregor, Naomie Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, 105 min.
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