Two veterans of the James Bond franchise — Pierce Brosnan and “Quantum of Solace” star Olga Kurylenko — star in the Eastern European spy thriller “The November Man,” but this one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.
Brosnan plays an intermittently alcoholic ex-CIA spy who gets dragged into the drama of a missing Chechnyan girl who was raped by a Russian thug who is about to become president of his country. To find her, Peter (Brosnan) checks in with her Belgrade social worker (Kurylenko), periodically taking breaks to exchange badinage and gunfire with Mason (Luke Bracey), a former protégé who flunked one mission and then killed Peter’s girl.
Brosnan, doing what he incorrectly believes to be an American accent, seems far too wrinkly to be pistol-whipping lads not yet born when the last “Remington Steele” rerun went off the air, while director Roger Donaldson never settles on a personality for his hero. Is he a bleeding-heart naif, the kind of man who turns his back on the spooks because an innocent boy accidently got killed in a split-second decision during an op that incidentally saved Peter’s own life? If so, why does he later savagely cut the artery of an entirely innocent girl whose only mistake was romancing Peter’s former spy-school pupil Mason? And what’s the point of Peter’s nervously pausing every few scenes to gulp whiskey, when he’s otherwise so icy and efficient? Brosnan (also an executive producer on this vanity project) evidently hopes the character will read as complicated. Instead he comes across as confused.
Donaldson, a veteran Australian director who was hot in the 1980s, should know to avoid the many rookie mistakes he lazily makes here. The implausible action scenes are such a mess that they could have been edited by a SaladShooter.
And as we learn more about the Chechen War and its part in current events, the mounds of exposition never resolve themselves into a satisfying or even clear shape. When a big twist arrives, it simply doesn’t matter, though it does reveal that a subsidiary character who isn’t played by one of the movie’s executive producers has a far more interesting backstory than Peter, who swoops in to take over the big scene anyway. His big secret, meanwhile, is that he has a daughter in boarding school, a simple fact that you’d think a watchful CIA would have known, especially since she was born when Peter still worked for the Company.
As for the dialogue, every line seems to have been lifted directly from the Big Book of Screenwriter Clichés: “He’ll come after us with everything he’s got.” “He played you for a fool.” “They’re gonna kill us all.” Sad that Pierce forgot the most pertinent cliché of all: He’s too old for this s- -t.