Content tagged with “movies”

I’ve long-felt that No Way Out is one of the great overlooked spy films. Released in 1987, it was was early starring role for Kevin Costner.

Costner is Tom Farrell, a Navy officer working in the Pentagon. He’s sleeping with Susan, who also happens to be sleeping with the Secretary of Defense.

One night, the Secretary accidentally kills her during an argument about her other lover (who he doesn’t know is Farrell). He concocts a plan to find the other lover and frame him as “Yuri,” a rumored Soviet deep cover agent that has been operating in DC for years. The CIA can then kill him and resolve Susan’s death without the Secretary’s involvement ever being known.

The Secretary assigns Farrell to find the other lover… which puts him in the problematic position of running a manhunt of which he is the target.

You might think I’ve revealed too much, but I haven’t. It’s a tightly-wound thriller with great performances from Costner, Gene Hackman as the Secretary, and a young Will Patton as his scheming assistant who has an agenda of his own.

Top it off with a head-snapping twist at the end, and you end up with an amazing thriller that never quite got the renown that it should have.

I read somewhere that 1955’s To Catch a Thief was fairly spy-adjacent. I watched it this morning.

It’s got about everything you need: a very debonair hero in Cary Grant (he was 51 at the time), a beautiful girl in Grace Kelly (she was just 26), amazing locations on the French Rivera, elegant galas, classic sports cars, and intrigue around stolen jewels.

Grant is John Robie, a former jewel thief nicknamed “The Cat” who broke out of prison during World War II and joined the French Resistance. He became a hero and earned parole, then went straight. But 15 years later, someone has started robbing the idle rich in Nice and Cannes using John’s old techniques. He has to catch the real thief before the police come for him.

It’s probably as close to a Bond film as you can get without actually being about espionage. The love affair between Grant and Kelly is a little weird when you consider their ages, but it’s handled in typically vague fashion for the 1950s.

Parts of it were filmed on location, and the scenery is gorgeous. But I almost forgot it was a Hitchcock movie — it just doesn’t have that Hitchcockian vibe to it.

I watched Code Name: Emperor on Netflix. (That’s the English title, anyway — it’s a Spanish film. I watched it with English subtitles.)

It stars Luis Tosar, who is apparently one of the most popular actors in Spain (the only other thing I’ve seen him in is as the Big Boss in the Miami Vice movie). He plays Juan, some kind of intelligence agent — only once does someone refer to “The Agency.”

There’s are two plot threads, which confused me. A German couple is smuggling radioactive material, and Juan has been asked to find kompromat on a young politician. Those are two separate things, it turned out, but both of them play into a crisis of conscience that Juan is struggling with, which culminates in a monologue by a General about how military control and blackmail helps maintain the political order.

In retrospect, it was a little confusing. But it was compelling while I was watching it. There’s a romantic subplot which is genuinely touching, and Tosar does a great job embodying a weary agent who is questioning what side of the fence he’s actually on.

I was reminded of the bit player from three consecutive James Bond movies who witnesses something surreal and subsequently questions his sobriety. He was uncredited, but IMDb lists him as “Man with Bottle” twice and “Man with Wine Glass” once.

The official YouTube channel compiled all three clips into this short video.

One hopes that he’s stopped drinking by now.

True Lies came to the historic theater in our local downtown. I last watched it in the theater fully 32 years ago when it originally released.

I still remember seeing “Tom Arnold” in the opening credits and thinking, “Aw, this is going to suck…” But his character turned out to be one of the best things in the movie.

I’ve always liked the intersection of action and human stories. The marriage angle is kind of fascinating, and the ending is fulfilling. And Bill Paxton does a great job playing a slimy used car salesman trying to bed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

The entire film holds up really well. The sound, in particular, was absolutely incredible. There was supposed to be a sequel, but terrorism was a problematic subject after 9/11, and then Arnold was elected governor of California in 2003. Apparently a TV series was written, cast, picked up… and then ultimate canceled.

My wife even liked it, which I did not expect.

I watched The Ipcress File from 1965. It was based on Len Deighton’s first novel and was released at the height of mid-60s “Bond-mania” as kind of an anti-Bond.

Michael Caine is Harry Palmer, an Army officer working for the Ministry of Defence. He’s insolent and insubordinate and has some criminal charges in his background. Harry’s world is one of dreary offices, gloomy London streets, condescending bosses, and rote paperwork.

He’s assigned to a unit that’s trying to recover a missing scientist and discover why several other scientists have seemingly become incapable of doing critical research.

There are lots of Bond alumni here: Harry Saltzman produces, Ken Adams built the sets, and John Barry delivers one of the most classic 60s spy soundtracks you’re ever going to find (the sound you hear over and over is a cimbalom). The film direction is artistic — lots and lots of shots through some foreground object to the main action behind it.

It's a solid movie. It has a good mystery, a great climax, and Caine is fantastic in the title role.

There were a few more Harry Palmer films, both in theaters and on television, though none of them are considered as good as Ipcress. There was also a limited series in 2022 on British television which is streaming on multiple services.

I’ve always loved the opening scene of the original Mission Impossible. It was set in Prague, and it was the perfect mix of action and intrigue.

As luck would have it, I found myself in Prague a couple years ago, and I spent an entire day tracking down all the shooting locations I could find. (I thought this was novel and original, but it turns out a lot of people have done it.)

I put my pics, and the corresponding frame from the movie, into this Google Doc.

I watched The 39 Steps, which is a Hitchcock movie from 1935. It’s considered one of the classic spy thrillers.

A man in London runs into a woman who claims to be a spy who has uncovered an intelligence network in Scotland. She’s on the run from assassins. Before long, the man is accused of her murder, and he has to flee into Scotland to find whatever she uncovered and prove his innocence.

It’s quite good for its time. The final sequence is really well-done and brings it all together. And I’m no expert on Hitchcock, but there’s a lot of signature style from him in there (including a brief cameo).

I’m not sure if I missed it, but I wasn’t quite sure which side was the bad guys here. This was 1935, so I imagine it must have been the Germans…?

Syriana from 2005 is my favorite kind of movie: it has lots of plot threads that overlap and come together in different ways. I learned that this style has name: hyperlink cinema.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this style is that the film was wildly complex and hard to understand. While I was watching it for the first time, I was only barely understanding the overall plot mechanics and why everyone was doing what they were doing.

Over a decade ago, I found an interactive “plot explorer” tool for the movie that let you visually follow different threads on a digital surface. It’s here, but it was created in Flash, which hasn’t been relevant or supported on the web for years, so it doesn’t work on my browser.

Helpfully, the creator also converted it to a static image. It shows all the different groups and how they intersect, explaining what their individual motivations are which can help you figure out the plot.

(It’s worth mentioning also that Syriana has an awful torture scene which is probably the biggest impediment to me ever re-watching it.)

Chases are all over the place in spy movies, but the second car chase in Ronin is one of the best on film. It’s a BMW and a Peugeot through the streets of Paris.

It’s very realistic (except maybe for a weird amount of sparks). There’s no musical soundtrack for most of it, just more than seven full minutes screaming engines and scraping metal. Robert DeNiro looks like he’s on the verge of a stroke from start to finish.

6 Underground is a guilty pleasure. It combines Michael Bay with Ryan Reynolds — maybe the two most un-subtle people in Hollywood.

The movie is unapologetically ridiculous, but I always thought it did a great job with exposition. There’s a lot of backstory to get through, and it nicely weaves that through a set of flashbacks.

The plot isn’t terrible, but it’s essentially just a framework to hang 4-5 action set pieces on.

This is a not a “good” movie, in the traditional sense, but it’s wildly entertaining. Every shot is visually stunning and the action is well-choreographed.

I shut my brain off and re-watch it a couple of times a year. I just don’t tell people about it.

Here’s a short video about Daniel Craig’s screen test for Bond (it says 2006, but Casino Royale was released in 2006, so it had to be earlier than that). There’s a voiceover from Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about how much they wanted Craig for the role.

Then, towards the end, you see and hear the scene they’re doing — it’s the “I’m the money” scene between Vesper and Bond (”…every penny of it”) that was on the train in the film but is being done on a hotel room set for the screen test.

Vesper is played by someone other than Eva Green. I’m not sure who is playing Craig’s haircut.

M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye has to go down as one of the great monologues in the Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the new Bond, and we had a female M in Judi Dench, which people weren’t so sure about, but this one scene likely laid every concern to rest.

I especially love it when Bond says “point taken,” thinking that would defuse the situation, but M just goes right on to tell him how she’d be perfectly happy to “send a man out to die.” And this was after she deliver the now-classic, “sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War.” And let’s not forget the symbolism of when M summarily dismisses Bond’s suggestion about the bottle her “predecessor” kept in the office.

Bond’s responses are key to the exchange too. Beyond the dialog, he has some facial expressions and pauses that really sell the idea that he’s dealing with something completely new.

The scene is utterly brilliant, and it launched one of the greatest character portrayals in the Bond movie canon. I’d never say GoldenEye was one of the top-tier Bond films, but it was exactly the film that the series needed at the time it came it out, and Dench was exactly the supporting actor that Brosnan needed to land on his feet.

Chief of Station was a bit of a miss. It’s well-filmed, on-location in Budapest, and even has a bit part for a former Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko was Camilla Montes in Quantum of Solace). It opens with a nice scene of tradecraft, which makes up for a particularly uncomfortable torture scene later on (a la Syriana, but worse).

However, I just don’t think Aaron Eckhart is that great of an actor, and a lot of the story depends on him (apparently, Alec Baldwin was originally cast in the role). Plus, the writing was just kind of tired. Nothing interesting to see here, honestly.

Doug DeMuro reviews the Jaguar XKR from Die Another Day, currently on display in the Petersen Museum. Better yet, he drives it on Los Angeles city streets, complete with a mounted gatling gun in the back. (Spoiler: other than the body shell, it’s not a Jaguar at all…)

Though not technically a “spy,” The Thomas Crown Affair does lurk on the periphery. I loved the Pierce Brosnan version from 1999, and it looks like we’re getting a new one from Michael B. Jordan.

Letterboxd has published its Top 100 Spy Films. It’s a pretty good list. Happy to see two of Daniel Craig’s Bond films quite high (before any Connery film, notably), along with Rogue One (if it included TV, then Andor would no-doubt be up there too).

Thunderbolts seems like a really odd choice, but No Way Out is an absolute favorite of mine.

Haywire is fully 15 years old, back when Gina Carano was known only for MMA , hadn’t done Star Wars, and hadn’t made the tweets that got her canceled.

It’s not a bad movie at all. It’s directed by Steven Soderberg, and it shows. It’s very moody, very stylized. And the soundtrack is by the same guy who did Out of Sight and the Oceans series. It’s very much got the same vibe.

What’s amazing is the cast. It’s got some heavy hitters in supporting — and some very small — roles: Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor.

All throughout, I knew what was happening on a small scale, but I didn’t understand why. Carano was running, fighting, and shooting a lot, but… why, exactly? Turns out, I wasn’t just dumb, because the plot isn’t clearly explained until the last five minutes of the movie.

As for Carano, this was her first “real” movie, and I alternated thinking she was pretty stiff one minute, and thinking she wasn’t half bad the next. Well, it turns out a bunch of her lines were dubbed (by Laura San Giacomo, no less), so that might explain the uneven-ness of her performance.

Still, not a bad movie. Worth watching.

Argylle was not a “good” film, but it was inventive and amusing. It’s basically a big spy parody, with a pretty decent twist in the middle that I didn’t see coming. But it’s way, way too long, at two-and-a-half hours.

Also, it absolutely bombed at the box office. Made less than $100 million when it had to make about $500 million to be considered successful. We were supposed to get a crossover/shared universe with Kingsman, but that’s certainly not going to happen now.

Honestly, I like Henry Cavill in about anything spy related. He should of been Bond.

Jack Ryan, Ghost War was very paint-by-numbers. I enjoy John Krasinski in the role, but there was nothing in this film that was interesting. Even the action sequences were tired.

I liked the prior series format, because a plot could develop over eight full hours of story. This is only about 90 minutes, and the plot is about an inch deep. Even with that, honestly, I had a hard time figuring out what was shooting at who and why.

Not great.