Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

From the Swedish director Tomas Alfredson(who directed Let the Right One In(2008), an awful horror movie) comes this British espionage Cold War based story. With an impressive cast to follow up, including John Hurt, Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy amongst others and first impressions of the plot and the movie poster being at the right spots for me, I would think that this would be a quality of a film to remember.

Unfortunately, continuity errors, chronological confusions and identity crisis’s disallow any redemption at retaining my interest back into this world of spies and moles. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’s way of directing is at times, even more mysterious and ultimately obnoxious than trying to figure out who the mole is at the top of the Circus, also known as MI6, as I later found out outside of the movie. Not that it would be essential to make this clear to the audience, but it would had helped a bit for this particular case, what with all of the confusion.

It was confounding to keep up with each of the character's identities and their code names, the pace felt slow wrongfully and the direction of the events was unappealingly bland. Whenever the characters would discuss their current problems and the fact that a mole is active, I didn't even care enough by the way it was presented plus how the movie's pace went.

It's too bad, because this looked promising to say the least. I went back and watched it a second time, and yet again, I was unable to keep my interest even after uncovering how the story works with it's bad way of directing the time events and the continuity errors accompanying them.

Perhaps the original television series or even the novel are better products than this, but I am not in the mood for any of that at the moment. TTSS's premise felt promising, the cast is impressive and the setting plus the story should sound good on paper, but the execution, performances and flow of it all was pretty much missing for me, resulting into a quite dissapointing movie.

Rating: 5.5