That was an excellent one.

Some things I liked some I did not.

good back-story, and good acting

A Disappointing Continuation

I watched it last night. I expected a spy story, with such a cast ,a sophisticated spy story. If I can imagine a scenario that fits just what I saw, I would say its just as if an amateur writer was asked to have a crack at a spy story. Listed before the writer were several plotlines that had to be fulfilled, including a certain kind of ending. Using that information just go ahead and do your best with the development of the story. The characters were not developed so as to have any sort of opinion about anything that happened to them. The disjointed plot just dragged all the players toward a contrived pre ordained ending. It wasn't enjoyable because the characters, plot, and story development were not consistent with each other. Sometimes spy stories can be puzzlingly complex, but this one was puzzlingly amateurish.

Our Kind of Traitor is a solid but dull film with a lot of foreign location shooting but it is also rather predictable.I understand that some of the people who worked on the BBC television series The Night Manager also worked in this film. Whereas the long form television series managed to maintain its tension and had several well staged set pieces throughout its running length. This was lackluster.Perry (Ewan McGregor) a lecturer and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) a lawyer are on holiday in Marrakesh. Perry is invited to party with Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) a brash Russian who is really a financier for a Russian mobster.Dima asks for Perry's help to save his family by becoming a MI6 informant as he has information on British financiers and politicians who have laundered money for the Russian underworld. Perry needs to contact a sympathetic MI6 agent.It is well acted especially by Skarsgård but it all feels rather restraint.

Based on the John LeCarre novel and co-scripted by him.I always felt LeCarre had lost his way a bit after the whole Circus and Smiley's people thing. But this modern look at the Russian Mafia / oligarch scene is worth the price of admission. By no means a summer BLOCKBUSTER but a good tale well told with great photography and a well acted script.And the usual LeCarre twist at the end...

When it comes to John Le Carre film adaptation's there's sadly quite a large gulf that has developed between the great: Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, the middle of the road: The Tailor of Panama and the lackluster: A Most Wanted Man and while last year with the overrated miniseries The Night Manager, Le Carre has found success, My Kind of Traitor is very much the lackluster Le Carre, with Susanna White's thriller failing to get the blood pumping.The good Le Carre novels and adaptation's find themselves mastering both suspense and layered plots and they're both elements amiss from White's film (and The Two Faces of January director and Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini's lifeless script) that never feels either believable enough or interesting enough to make use of a recognisable cast that all flounder with subpar material that fails to play to their individual strengths, while White who has made a career behind camera largely as a miniseries specialist, directs Le Carre's subpar material without an ounce of any real effort that hampers the film even more so.Centring around the largely chemistry free struggling couple of Ewan McGregor's Perry and Naomie Harris's Gail, who in the blink of an eye become friends with Stellan Skarsgård's Russian Mafia accountant Dima on a European relationship saving holiday, only to find themselves quickly entrenched in a government backed mission to save Dima and his family from the big bad's his looking to rat out, Our Kind of Traitor fails to make us believe things could transpire as they do and for a film of this ilk to be so uninvolving and tiresome with a lack of any true thrills and spectacle (other than some great scenery and crisp DOP work from the ever impressive Anthony Dod Mantle), no amount of cast saving would've helped this film feel like anything more than a glorified BBC event film.Wasting a cast that could and should be doing much more and bringing to life a Le Carre story that surely ranks amongst some of his most uninspired, Our Kind of Traitor may be of some joy to the authors fervent followers and those that count BBC productions amongst their yearly calendar highlights but for the rest of us there will likely be countless other thrillers both from cinemas and the small screen that are endlessly more memorable and engaging than this instantly forgettable and seen a million times before affair.1 ½ tennis matches out of 5