Pierce Brosnan in The November Man

      I first saw Pierce Brosnan in the light-hearted private detective TV show, Remington Steele.  He and Stephanie Zimbalist played a sleuthing team with shades of Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man movies.  

     Smooth, debonair, great-looking in a suit, dark hair perfect, cool British Isles accent, Brosnan seemed destined after a few years on that show to play James Bond, but his contract with Remington Steele forced him to do one more year, the opportunity passed, the role went to Timothy Dalton.

     Later, Brosnan played James Bond four times and was surprised when he wasn't asked to return in Casino Royale (2006).  Instead, he's acted in thirty-four films to date.  Damn, this man is busy!

     In 2014 he was in A Long Way Down (which, from the trailer, appears to be a comedy about suicide, with a Richard Curtis vibe, i.e. shite) and then, washing his previous effort with blood and hard hits, came The November Man.

     It's a spy story, a blood and guts international intrigue suspense tale.  Stunts top caliber, motorcycle chases through Belgrade, actual Belgrade, exploding cars, assassins killing at long range.  A surveillance drone tracking the movements of a mole in the Kremlin, a Russian woman who happens to be the mother of November Man's child.  He's Peter Devereaux, formerly of the CIA, an in-theater operations man who's trained an assassin and operative in the arts of long-distance murder, and, more importantly, in the arts of living in between those times, but without success in the latter lessons.

     David Mason, played by Luke Bracey, makes Peter go on a warpath against some colleagues of his own past.  He assassinates, following orders from the CIA director, the Russian double agent who has incriminating rape-of-children allegations against the "man soon to be Premier of Russia," Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski--is there a fan club?) is indeed poised to become Premier.  He has enough backing in the Federal Assembly, turns out he has past CIA ties with Peter Devereaux's hilariously amoral former boss, Hanley (Bill Smitrovich), who has most of the best lines in the movie.

     CIA honcho Hanley, a bald, profane global strategist who seeks to control Russia and increase the hurt on the Middle East, worked in Chechnya with Arkady Federov some fifteen years before.  He conspired with Federov to blow up a building housing Russian soldiers and security personnel.  The demolition caused Russia to invade, starting the second Chechen War.  Federov and his men acted as petty lords over the local population, Federov taking for his own a forced concubine, the teenaged Alice Fournier (Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko).  Years later, Devereaux no longer works for the CIA and is retired, raising his twelve year old daughter in Lausanne, Switzerland.

     David Mason's killing of Devereaux's woman precipitates Pierce Brosnan's 007-type mayhem.  We've seen this in other films of the past, starring middle-aged men turned action here; with Liam Neeson, for instance, seeking to remedy the kidnapping conditions of the Taken films (I haven't seen them).  If Jerry Lewis were alive, would he play an embittered divorcee on a killing spree against the gang that sold his daughter to Jeffrey Epstein?

     The contrast between the more noble Peter and the self-admitted blasé assassin just following orders, David, is held up as a main point of contention and style.  Peter's assessment of David in his training

amounted to a recommendation of Don't Accept This Guy.  Still, David entered service with the CIA, probably at the behest of Hanley, who cultivates the undisciplined young killer, training him to carry out hit jobs leading to Hanley's favorite fantasy, to be a top strings-puller in the national will to dominate others, to determine nations' destinies from an intelligence and subterfuge standpoint.  Premier Federov as his puppet.  

     Interesting inversion of the later (2016, two years after the film) belief system based on the notion of a world leader manipulated by agents of a foreign power, premise of Russiagate, a theory as fictional as The November Man.

     I watched the film this afternoon, about eight hours ago, it sits well with me.  Pierce Brosnan, graying though still spry and believable as an action star at age sixty-one, gives a good performance as a man tired of fighting, but needing to do so to recover his peace by the big beautiful lake in Switzerland.  His former wife (or lover?  I'm not sure) gets killed in a small car next to him by his former pupil, David Mason.  He must right this wrong.  On the way he finds that his own former boss fucked him over and is a horrible piece of shit who must be stopped.  Lots on Peter's plate, and his daughter hasn't even been kidnapped yet!  

     Much of the film deals with his relationship, one of protector, towards the grown up Alice Fournier.  Olga Kurylenko is very good in the film, giving a steady and believable performance.  She knows dark shit about Federov.  The Russian double agent had evidence of Federov's pedophilia and record of atrocities in Chechnya.  

     FEDEROV MUST NOT BECOME PREMIER OF RUSSIA, though Hanley has the opposite goal.

     Meanwhile, Federov has sent a female assassin, Alexa (Amila Terzimehic, a Bosnian actress with a fascinating nose) to murder Alice and secure the photos of all the girls who encountered Arkady Federov and ended up dead.  

     Alexa is an interesting character, has a few lines, no more, isn't in the movie enough.  I get the impression she had a scene or two or three cut.  We see her doing the splits in a leotard in her hotel room in Belgrade.  Dispatched from Moscow, she's just arrived there.  We get the impression she's not a professional gymnast, but knows gymnastics, maybe got recruited Nikita-style from the Russian Olympic team.  Anyway, Alexa absents herself from about two-thirds of the movie, coming back, surprising me when she came back, I'd forgotten her, but I said, "What the fuck has she been doing all this time?"

     I'll never know.  She tracks Alice relentlessly.  She finds her in a very public train hub, writing her Federov story in a public internet kiosk.  This assassin had already made a try at her early in the movie but Peter Devereaux came along, thwarted Alexa's murderous attempt.  Alexa comes across like how the terminator in that movie is a programmed machine.  Alexa has been programmed to kill people.  She's good at it, presumably, except that we never see her succeed at anything more difficult than shooting a man in the back of the head at point blank range.

     Alice makes eye contact with Alexa, the article she's been writing pertaining to Federov and his evil vice will have to wait.  She slips out, chased by Alexa, gun with silencer drawn, people getting out of her way as you would do.  Conveniently, but it's pretty cool, there are metal pipes the length of baseball bats near Alice's ambushing spot.  Alexa approaches like a cheetah getting ready to run fast.  Alice, perpendicular to Alexa's approaching position, swings pipe, connects with Alexa's face, plants her on the ground like a fainted model.

     Returning to the computer station, she finishes the communique to the New York Times, a hastily written story about Federov, CIA personnel under Hanley conspiring with the Russian to blow up a building, killing many Russians and starting a war.

     For one thing, the New York Times circa 2014 and in 2022, too, would not publish a story putting the CIA in a bad light, because that newspaper has CIA people working for it and CIA-sympathetic people, too.  That's the way it's been in U.S. mainstream media since 1949.  I didn't buy the film's rogue CIA nutcase angle.  Why does Hanley have to be rogue?  Why couldn't many others in the Company be part of Hanley's plan; he's the executioner of the plan but he didn't order it.  An idea more in keeping with reality than this rogue CIA bullshit.  Most people who work for the CIA believe in the cause of protecting international finance.  The coups, the support for dictators, the drone-bombing of innocent civilians, the violations of civil and human rights, the torture, are all fine with people who work for the CIA, but are also fine with many millions of Americans.

     One bad apple spoils the bunch, like when police commit wrongs, kill people, even, cover up the circumstances, for anything that makes them look bad must be squashed and never released.  It isn't single bad apples, the problem lies with institutional rot, systems needing overhauls and abolishments.  Justice needed, but Peter Devereaux has a sense of justice.  Unnecessary killing is off limits in his practice.  Mason, however, kills without pondering. 

     Kill a politician, take a shower, eat pizza.

     Mason's flip near the end, where he risks his life to rescue Devereaux's kidnapped daughter, an act turning the tide on Hanley and his men, seems unlikely, given his portrayal earlier in the movie.  Given the chance to chase and possibly kill an unarmed Devereaux, or call for help and attend to the woman he banged the night before, he chooses the woman, her right inside thigh slashed by Devereaux's knife, femoral artery spurting.  The teacher still teaches.  What's more important?  Saving her life, or chasing one who has enough head start on him to amount to a will-o'-the-wisp.

     Thus begins, as the screenwriters (Michael Finch and Karl Gajdusek) have chosen to attempt to make us believe, the rehabilitation of a soulless killer, David Mason.  He apparently learns to empathize, yet such an emotion of relating to others doesn't exist in him until it's magically (screenwriters wrote some words to make it so) driven into the film.

     The woman across the hall, the one who gets her thigh cut by the hero of the film, Peter Devereaux, invites David in for coffee, gets nothing but his phone ringing, a convenient interruption as he walks away listening to someone else.  She finally confronts him over his lack of response.  He takes her dancing, they fuck in a dark room.  David gets close to someone for about twelve hours, then he's calling an ambulance for her because his former teacher is furious at him for shooting his ex-girlfriend to death.

     Sorry Karl and Michael, I'm not buying David Mason's transformation into a good, albeit hard case person with a frankly horrifying job used mostly against people who don't deserve it.

    Peter's called the November Man because he was cold-blooded in operations, or so explains Hanley, but before that I thought it meant the last month before a geopolitical winter, when a new Cold War starts. 

     I think it's pretty clear. 

     Cold War Redux is here.

     It makes a good movie.

Vic Neptune