Film Review: Spooks: The Greater Good

Dir: Bharat Nalluri

With: Peter Firth, Kit Harington, Elyes Gabel

Running time: 104mins

Having kept a small army of fans hooked across 10 seasons of high-stakes spy thrills British TV favourite Spooks gets a belated cinema outing but only partially makes a successful leap to the big screen.

For while its episodic exploits drew inevitable (and occasionally unfavourable) comparisons with the likes of 24, its cinematic endeavours put it on a playing field with genre entries such as Bourne and Bond. And judged by those standards, A Greater Good falls a little short.

The film is at its best when exploring the moral and ethical complexity of the spy game, as well as the emotional cost of playing it, as exemplified by Peter Firth's returning and highly beleaguered MI5 boss Harry Pearce.

But it's letdown by some lazy plotting that relies a little too obviously on contrivance. There are at least two points that require a massive leap of faith when it comes to piecing the story together.

The plot in question picks up as a notorious terrorist, Qasim (Elyes Gabel), is sprung, mid-transit, from MI5's clutches as they are attempting to hand him over to the CIA. The failure brings fresh pressure on Pearce, who subsequently goes dark in an attempt to flush out the internal traitor he believes is aiding Qasim in a bid to deliver a telling blow to MI5 credibility and strengthen the CIA's hand in controlling it.

Drawn into the ensuing mess is former spy Will Holloway (Kit Harington), who must attempt to track down Qasim and foil an imminent terror attack, while working with former mentor Pearce to flush out the traitor.

A newcomer to the series, Harington's casting is actually one of the best things about Bharat Nalluri's film as the actor, renowned for his portrayal of the simmering but driven Jon Snow in TV's Game of Thrones, brings the same level of intensity to proceedings here. His performance invests Holloway with a far greater complexity than the script, by Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent, sometimes allows, combining elements of vulnerability and confusion with a bitterness and resilience required to survive in a complex trade.

Firth, too, revels in his similarly engrossing portrayal of Pearce, a long-time fan favourite, whose various manipulations of both the system and the personnel within it make him a fascinating enigma - a man constantly pursuing the greater good of the film's title no matter what the cost to his own integrity and humanity. Both he and Harington work well together.

Of note, too, is the film's sustained ability to create uncertainty as to who will prevail, with several of the higher profile cast members sacrificed in much the same manner as the TV show's principals regularly were.

Nalluri, himself a veteran of several Spooks episodes (including the final two episodes), also deserves some praise for delivering one or two slick set pieces and for making good use of the London and Berlin locations, clearly benefitting from the film's bigger budget. A sequence at Heathrow and another on London's South Bank are genuinely tense and well executed.

It's just a shame that the overall enjoyment is marred by some of the more lazy elements of the writing, particularly in regard to the motivations behind the central terror plot and the internal betrayal. Both lack either the believability or ability to grip that films like the Bourne franchise, or even more recent TV series such as Homeland, regularly exercise and, if anything, compromise the film's ability to be taken seriously.

Indeed, some of the plot devices are just plain groan-inducing in regard to the actions of some characters, with Tuppence Middleton's rookie spy faring particularly badly in terms of her story arc, and Gabel's terrorist starved of the sort of screen-time needed to deliver anything other than a token bad guy.

If, as probably anticipated, A Greater Good is intended to extend the Spooks brand into a film franchise of its own, the writing will need to be tightened up considerably. But in spite of its many shortcomings, Nalluri and company have laid enough groundwork to suggest that it could be capable of better and more.

Solid rather than spectacular or ground-breaking, Spooks is engaging enough to satisfy both fans and newcomers alike.