Spooks: The Greater Good 2015

A feature length version of the UK TV show. This time Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) has to go to ground after an operation goes wrong. He suspects a mole and tries to recruit the help of an ex-agent (Kit Harington) to uncover the plot.

Hard to find many good things to say about this soulless spin-off. Peter Firth is solid as the spy boss but it’s just not enough to make a whole movie work, and as a result it comes off as a weaker episode of the TV show rather than a triumphant return to the big screen.

The title “The Greater Good” comes from the notion that Pearce must co-operate with a terrorist in order to obtain information critical to uncovering the mole, and as a result prevent an American takeover of MI5. It’s a tedious case of internal politics; something that Pearce used to make interesting on screen, but in this case he’s out in the cold.

The cast struggle with the weird, stunted dialogue. Someone spent more time googling ‘stuff spies might say’ than they did actually writing a screenplay.

Spooks: The Greater Good isn’t an overtly terrible film and the opening scenes are fairly gripping. It’s the slow realisation that nothing interesting is going to happen beyond the start that makes you wish you’d bitten down on the cyanide capsule sooner.

https://benoliver999.com/film/2017/08/19/spooksthegreatergood/

I never watched the television show Spooks so have nothing invested in the characters or any history they might have from watching the ten series of BBC TV’s Spooks. So I went into this with open eyes.

Watching gritty, realistic, spy thrillers is always a nonsense because in real life real spies are fat middle-aged businessmen when they get caught and real government assassins tend not to get found out about ever. So to watch this film you have to except that really, it’s silly stuff-n-puff. A huge pinch of salt is definitely required before the film even starts.

Talking about silly stuff the film starts on the most ridiculous premise, the CIA’s most wanted terrorist is being transported across London and they get ‘stuck in a traffic jam’. There are no cleared routes for this most dangerous of terrorists and the escort is two cars with four agents and two guards in the transporter. Therein lies the problem with this film – you start off with a flawed premise and then the viewer just ends up seeing all the others because falling down huge plot holes with improbability spikes at the bottom are not fun.

The acting is very British TV acting, so not awful but not particularly great either, you can see the screen craft as it appears on the screen, head holding, sideways glances and so forth. Kit Harington was surely cast just because of Game of Thrones but in all honesty he did well with a slightly stereotyped role but nothing special, Tuppence Middleton is badly miscast but the rest do as best as they can with their roles.

To me the whole thing seemed slightly amateurish and a bit clichéd but throughout the story the huge plot holes and absurdities kept bubbling to the surface. Adem Qasim was surely the most insipid and toothless terrorist in celluloid terrorists. Who exactly was he supposed to be representing? He didn’t want to kill civilians? He would give everything up for his wife? I thought he was driven and the most dangerous on the CIA’s books? If so, he did not appear so.

Despite this the film was watchable until the final quarter when MI5 seemed fairly easy to break into and hold hostage the top directors. Just go down and ‘access passage’ in the carpark – are you sure? Then Will Holloway turned Ethan Hunt taking down a particularly slow and dozy seeming Adem which was followed in the aftermath by both Will and bad-ass Harry strolling out of the carpark of a recently attacked MI5 unimpeded. For goodness sake let’s try to keep in grounded.

In all this was a vanilla film, it wasn’t poor but it was so similar to many others and in all honesty seemed more budgeted as a TV movie or extra-long Spooks special.

The decision of the filmmakers to essentially pick up where the TV show left off instead of rebooting with completely new characters, leaves this film with a difficult task and unfortunately anyone who has not seen the show will no doubt feel somewhat underwhelmed by it all. Much of the character development and some of the twists rely on audience awareness of characters and elements from the show to have their greatest impact and without that, it is likely to leave some viewers cold. That being said, it is easy to understand why the filmmakers stuck with this model as it allows them to ensure the series' greatest asset, Peter Firth, is front and centre throughout and for fans of the show (like myself) it is great to see him again, not least because he is the best thing about the film. It also does what Spooks often did so well, providing surprises in its willingness to show the murky choices Firth's character has to make - the tagline "The Greater Good" could be one that is equally applied to the show as a whole. Disappointingly however, whereas the TV show left us with a satisfactory sense of closure, the filmmakers are hoping for future instalments, and make the mistake of leaving Firth's character and the story, open-ended.