All the Old Knives is now streaming on Prime Video.
Just over eight years ago, Chris Pine starred in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, yet another in Paramount’s long line of attempts to reboot Tom Clancy’s everyman superspy. Although that would-be franchise fizzled out on the big screen (don’t worry, Ryan is alive and well on TV as embodied by John Krasinski), Pine was a good fit for the character and his world, so his leading turn in All the Old Knives, now streaming on Amazon Prime (right alongside the current incarnation of Jack Ryan), marks a welcome return to the genre for the star –– albeit under wildly different marching orders.
Based on Olen Steinhauer’s 2015 novel of the same name, All the Old Knives harks back to the espionage potboilers of an earlier era, evoking (in ambition if not execution) John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Tailor of Panama.
This is the kind of slow-burn character piece that would, at one time, have been a favored theatrical alternative to the usual blockbusters and blue sky-beams. But in the streaming age, such movies land on Amazon Prime, etc., garnering buzz for a week or two before getting subsumed by the next new thing and the exigencies of the algorithm. It’s a shame.
Beginning in the aftermath of a terrorist hijacking in 2012, All the Old Knives then jumps ahead to 2020, with CIA analyst Henry Pelham (Pine) tracking down former fellow analyst and one-time girlfriend Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton), now with family and retired from the service. Of course, this being a spy thriller, we can presume things are a bit more complicated than they appear.
Pelham has been tasked by station chief Vick Wallinger (Laurence Fishburne) to “close the book” on certain unanswered questions from that tragic day, in which an entire planeload of passengers lost their lives. Thus, he and Celia reconnect eight years after the hijacking, with their passion for each other still simmering just under the surface… but it’s not long before those old knives start to come out.
Espionage is nasty. It’s dirty. And as directed by Janus Metz Pedersen (whose 2017 film Borg/McEnroe I enjoyed quite a bit), All the Old Knives eschews the bombast and spectacle of Bond and Ryan in favor of a more intimate, quiet movie that lives largely in close-ups as various characters stare each other down across tables at restaurants and diners. It gets into the grittiness of spycraft – the emotional and psychological toll involved in moving living, breathing people hither and thither across an imaginary chessboard.
In that sense, this is a role that feels uniquely suited to Pine, benefiting greatly from the almost-decade of fermenting since his Jack Ryan escapade. He conveys both cold calculation and raw turmoil via his eyes (helped immensely by those aforementioned closeups). The actor’s chemistry with Newton is tangible, not merely in their love scenes (of which there are a few), but in the longing and distance they convey as the details of the plot are methodically unfurled, each cross-cut from past to present illuminating more details in an extremely complicated patchwork of fateful events.
As to that plot (with screenplay by Steinhauer himself), I’m not entirely sure how well it all holds together after a few hours to actually take stock of it, but certainly in the moment, there are enough twists and turns to justify the investment. While there’s the uncomfortable matter of this being yet another Hollywood film trotting out hoary stereotypes of barbaric Arab terrorists, there’s at least an attempt to showcase more complexity to these matters than a lot of the “They hate us because of our freedom” discourse in the aftermath of 9/11.
There’s an air of melancholy methodically woven into All the Old Knives. Far from feeling heroic or noble, it’s the sense that this line of work –– necessary though it often is –– has somewhat broken all the people tasked with executing it. Not just Pelham and Harrison, but also Wallinger and his second-in-command Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce). It’s about death and betrayal and tragedy, but mostly it’s about sadness. Incurable sadness.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/QUJVGYm
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