Language: English
Janus Metz’s All The Old Knives begins where most Hollywood movies end. A video from inside a hijacked plane in Vienna surfaces on the internet, indicating both hijackers and hostages are dead. Most Hollywood films tend to build towards a climax where a brave-heart action hero devises an ingenious plan, while getting help from a CIA chief standing in front of a giant screen and a last-minute ambush by a US military troupe at the most unlikely moment, to beat the bad guys and bring the hostages home safely. Unfortunately, here, we’re only left with a room full of American spies looking distraught, hanging their heads in shame. The happy ending in routine Hollywood fare, becomes a horrific beginning in this.
Based on a 2015 novel by Olen Steinhauer and adapted by the author himself, the film focuses on the fallout of a failed mission, and how it continues to haunt everyone even eight years later. Metz’s film has a distinct John le Carré flavour from the very beginning, where the closer we’re forced to look, the more we sense that everyone is not who they say they are. The line between their personal and professional lives of the spies begin to blur. Everyone seems to be dragging baggage of their past life - of dead parents, failed missions, a long and thankless career spent defending one’s nation from the shadows.
Henry Pelham (a devilishly handsome Chris Pine) has been charged with re-opening the ‘file’ on the Vienna hostage situation from eight years ago. A captured terrorist told the CIA before dying that he had help from an American ‘source’. Pelham is told that a phone call was made to a Tehran number from the Vienna station, more specifically senior analyst Bill Compton’s (Jonathan Pryce) office. But his office was open for everyone, including his direct subordinate, Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton), who was also Pelham’s love-interest at the time. It does seem rather silly that a high-level operative would make the error of calling a source from their office. This is the central mystery of the film: who was the mole in the station, who jeopardised the Vienna operation?
While many Hollywood films in the last two decades have tried to look into America’s disruption in the geopolitics in the middle-east through haunted (mostly male) spies, who are convinced to come back for that ‘one last operation’, Metz’s film does little to break new ground here.
Chris Pine’s Pelham doesn’t seem like the type who would try to purge his sins by day drinking in a mid-west bar, where he exists as a ghost. In fact, he looks like a middle-aged version of Steve Rogers, gracefully sporting his grey streaks with the glint in his eye of still being America’s golden boy. As Pelham takes charge to find out who the mole is, we routinely cut between two sets of longish interviews with Compton (Pryce) and Harrison (Newton). As they strain themselves for details around the events of that fateful day, the audience is fed information of how that day eventually unfolded resulting in the deadly suicide attack.
Metz’s film feels like a deliberately old-school spy film, where it carries out the le Carré paranoia through a significant portion of the film. The emphasis is equally on the mystery elements as much as it is on Pelham and Harrison’s steamy romance in Vienna, which was abruptly cut short after the failed mission. We’re fed nuggets of information through cross-cutting flashbacks from different POVs, making the interviews almost seem like a game of chess. All three actors are in fine form here, especially Jonathan Pryce, as a spy in his twilight years, trying to leave behind a career he has realised is a real-life version of Tetris - where ‘success’ vanishes, while ‘failures’ pile up one after the other. It’s only a matter of time before they pile up high enough to throw you out of the game. Newton, appearing in one of her meatiest feature film parts recently, makes full use of the opportunity that’s essentially about concealing from the camera as much as it is about performing for it. Pine is excellent as a murky Captain America-figure, especially in a post-Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks era.
All The Old Knives commits to its old-school sentimentality of a 90s movie, especially in the film’s final 20 mins. How you react to old-school methods might dictate how you look at the film at large. Personally, I found the final twist to be a bit of a cop-out for what is otherwise a delicious, slow-cooked thriller. I don’t mind the occasional weepy scene, but I thought the resolution was loud, without any impact. The horrific beginning of the film promised other things.
All the Old Knives is available on Amazon Prime Video
Rating: * * *
Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.
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