Judging from The November Man, based on a novel by Bill Granger, the CIA’s operations in Eastern Europe are a friends-and-family affair. Former colleagues plot one another’s deaths. A junior officer interrogates her superior. A scorned pupil takes aim at his mentor’s loved ones. Geopolitical intrigue ranks second to daddy issues.
The movie opens in Montenegro, where an overzealous effort to thwart an assassination results in a child’s death. Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) chastises his trainee, David Mason (Luke Bracey), for disobeying orders. Five years later, David gets unwitting revenge when he’s ordered to shoot Natalia (Mediha Musliovic). He doesn’t realise that she is Peter’s former lover and that her emergency extraction from Moscow has brought Peter out of retirement.
The talent pool for hits on operatives must be small. Despite craving his old teacher’s approval, David is assigned to tie up loose ends and kill Peter, which leads to a game of cat-and-mouse between them. They even call each other midpursuit. “I can’t believe you’ve still got the same phone number,” Peter says during a Belgrade chase.
Acting on Natalia’s intelligence, Peter searches for a missing woman with a secret that could ruin a Russian presidential contender. The social worker (Olga Kurylenko) who used to see the missing woman has already been targeted for death. Alas, this is the sort of movie in which even an assassin in a tank top, the kind who does leg stretches before a hit, comes across as an afterthought.
Further trivialising developments, the plot has incitement in Chechnya and covert government alliances. This summer, A Most Wanted Man illustrated how intelligence work requires tracing links up a chain. By contrast, The November Man takes place in a closed system in which everything is known. Concealed information can be reached with a few keystrokes. In the film’s sole gesture toward economy, a half-dozen characters seem to have dual motives.
The director, Roger Donaldson, no stranger to inane double-cross plots (The Recruit, in 2003), keeps the proceedings moving briskly. The film is nearly over before you begin to wonder why it’s called The November Man, and giving any thought to the explanation is besides the point.
There is something to be said for a thriller that rips along with no regard for anything other than its own pace, coasting on Brosnan’s blunter-than-Bond suavity and Kurylenko’s beauty. “You just doomed us to another decade of conflict,” someone says at the end. From the perspective of the movie, that’s no matter at all.
