“The November Man” is a strange and frustrating movie. On one hand, it seems to want to be a James Bond or Jason Bourne picture: the kind of film in which car chases are tracked by satellites and drones, super-competent assassins kill armies of henchmen while barely batting an eye, and good and bad guys alike often seem to just magically appear, a la Christopher Nolan superheroes, wherever the plot needs to them to be. At the same time, though, it wants to be a John Le Carre-type espionage drama, set in a version of dirty reality and mixing allusions to real-world geopolitical traumas (including Russian-Chechnyan conflict and CIA black ops) into the heroes’ derring-do. And the snarling, R-rated tough-guy worldview—which includes graphic shootings, knifings, rapes and sexist insults—sits rather uncomfortably with the movie’s desire to be a late-summer thrill ride. It wants to be taken seriously, and yet it doesn’t. This creates viewer whiplash, and makes the movie feel confused, at times dishonest.
The movie opens with a brief flash-forward. Government assassin Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) blasts his trainee, David Mason (Luke Bracey), for disobeying orders in an operation that was supposed to thwart an assassination but ended up causing a child’s death. Five years later, David is ordered to kill a former Russian double-agent named Celia (Caterina Scorsone) who broke into the office of the soon-to-be-elected president, Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski). Why? Without giving too much away, let’s just say that the CIA is up to no good, as is so often the case in movies and life, and that a self-interested power broker inside the agency wants to prevent the information that Celia stole from getting out and embarrassing the agency. Unfortunately for whoever did this, Devereaux has a deep bond with Celia, and embarks on a mission of revenge that also requires him to find a young woman named Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko) and prevent her from being killed by his former student David or by Russian killers (including the charismatic Natalia (Mediha Musliovic), a leggy mute with a stare that could burn holes in concrete. Meanwhile, David tries to thwart or kill his old mentor while struggling against the sneaking suspicion that his lethal proficiency and loyalty to the CIA are being abused for selfish purposes, in an off-the-books operation whose outlines he can barely discern.
Brosnan is perfectly cast as Devereaux. Handsome and lean but also grey and haggard, he has twenty years’ worth of experience playing these sorts of characters, starting with his version of James Bond, a colder, more self-loathing version of Ian Fleming’s super spy than fans were used to seeing. “I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you’ve killed, or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect,” another agent asked in “Goldeneye.”
“The November Man” is based on the seventh in a long-running series of novels about Devereaux by Bill Granger, but there are times when it seems to be a direct answer to that question, which Brosnan’s Bond answered with a knowing, faintly sad look. Devereaux is a highly functioning alcoholic who downs hard liquor the way other people drink water, and he admits to Alice that he has no life to speak of; he’s just a warm-blooded cipher living as far off the grid as he can, and trying to keep his personal relationships secret from the global espionage community so that they cannot be used against him. At one point Devereaux, who apparently quit the CIA out of long-delayed moral revulsion, lectures his former pupil on the need for moral clarity, telling him that you can be a man or a killer of men, “but not both, because one will eventually extinguish the other.”
This is all intriguingly regretful and angry stuff. It’s not at all the sort of thing you normally encounter in the sorts of films where people beat each other senseless in basements and make spectacular kill-shots while sailing through the air unloading handguns. Donaldson, who directed Brosnan in “Dante’s Peak,” is an unheralded master of down-and-dirty violence, and the film’s most brutal moments have a sting that has largely disappeared from Hollywood movies; when people get shot or stabbed or hit in the face with a blunt object, the audience gasps as if it happened right in front of them on the street, and that sort of visceral intensity shouldn’t be easily discounted.
But it’s all ultimately in the service of an ultimately retrograde, macho vision of lone heroes doing what lone heroes do, so it’s hard to accept it as anything other than a means of gussying up the usual Bourne-style super-fast mayhem with a world weariness, even cynicism, that the Bourne franchise did with a lot more conviction. Movies about assassins and gunfighters and other killers who come out of retirement for one last mission always have this insincerity problem. The characters pay lip service to the idea that being a paid killer rots the soul, but nobody who bought a ticket wants to see that character practice nonviolent resistance and play “Kumbaya” on a ukelele. “The November Man” also fails to earn the power it summons whenever it shows us scenes of people begin threatened with torture, or bloodily maimed, or raped. One character, an innocent, suffers mightily, and the film the character’s fear and physical pain seriously for a scene or two, then completely forgets about her; it also fails to develop the most important people in Devereaux’s life as characters, even obliquely, until the movie needs to terrorize them and jack up suspense and sympathy. Sam Peckinpah, this ain’t.
Source: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-november-man-2014
