Forget the three JBs: James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer. Spying is not all fun and games. According to John le Carre (who should know), the world of espionage is a slow paced and complex world of surveillance and tense multi-layered conversations which is far more likely to involve faffing around on your laptop in the backseat of your car than hanging around swigging martinis with Eva Green in a in casino. The heroes are not Daniel Craigs or Matt Damons but fat, cynical, middle-aged, gravelly voiced types like espionage officer Gunter Bachmann, played in one of his many final roles by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The setting is Hamburg, a city already edgy after the intelligence service’s failure to detect the plot within the city which led to the 2001 September 11th attacks in the US. Tensions are exacerbated further by the arrival of a Chechen immigrant Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) who quickly adopts the services of a human rights lawyer (Rachel McAdams) to gain access to his father’s fortune using Willem Dafoe’s morally dubious banker (is there any other kind?) to help. Trouble is, Bachmann suspects Karpov of being a terrorist and Robin Wright’s CIA agent is clearly up to something too.
Thanks to this, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Constant Gardener, le Carre (upon whose eleventh novel this is based) has been well served by movie adaptations of his work in the last decade and despite his advanced years the author is on hand to give a helpful recap of the plot while on location in the DVD extra John le Carre in Hamburg (a further “making of extra is just about worth watching too). With universally good performances, particularly from Wright and Hoffman, this is a slow moving but well executed espionage drama.
Overall Verdict: A fine farewell performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman enriches an intelligent espionage drama.
Special Features:
The Making Of A Most Wanted Man Featurette
Spymaster: John le Carre In Hamburg
Reviewer: Chris Hallam