Theater Whore: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Its hard to review this movie. Not that it wasn’t a good film. It was. But it felt more like something I would watch while at home with nothing else to do. It stars a lot of actors whose film credits I will not sit here and list. Honestly, if you don’t know the films of most of these people then something is seriously wrong with you. Some of the actors are Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman (this week’s Bad Ass Mofo), Colin Firth and John Hurt. The gist of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that the head of British Intelligence’s program The Circus is under new control. But there is someone in there who is a mole. It is up to a trusted few to figure out who it is and what damage they have already done.

While on a mission to gather information an agent (Strong) is killed. Control (Hurt) dies shortly after retiring and Smiley (Oldman) is brought back to investigate who the mole is. He goes and looks for people that were canned around the same time he and Control were and discovers that one lady was let go and kinda threatened after she expressed concern over one of the agents that was one a soldier. Another one is a dude that was asleep when he shouldn’t have been when the agent was shot. Haydon (Firth) said that he heard news of the killing which is weird because the way they receive information would have been turned off at the time. He heard because he was sleeping with Smiley’s wife who got the information at home.

Tarr (Hardy) shows up at Smiley’s house looking to clear his name. He was on a mission as an informant and met a woman who knew information about who the mole was. Though he gets sucker punched for being a traitor missing papers prove that he is innocent. The agent that was thought to have been killed at the beginning is actually alive and not so well. He got super tortured and beat to shit. He also got to watch the woman Tarr was trying to help murdered a foot away from him. He’s been teaching since being released.

This film was longer than two hours and kinda felt like it. Cam fell asleep at one point. I mean, the movie is not bad. God, I feel like I’m defending it too much. I have not read the book this is based off of nor have I seen the original film. The acting is good. The way it looks is amazing. This movie made me wish I owned suits. It just felt flat. I also knew that there was a lot of back story and information that I did not know because I didn’t read the book. When two characters give each other a look there’s about twenty pages worth of story I knew I wasn’t getting. There’s like two gay couples in this you never see show affection towards each other. I say wait for this to come out on video or something.