(Newser)
– Benedict Cumberbatch plays an English salesman recruited by the British and American intelligence services to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War courier, based on the true story of a Greville Wynne. On Friday, the film – which was screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival under the title Ironbark– Has a rating of 80% from critics for Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s what I say:
- “courier gives Cumberbatch another lively role, and the actor fits too comfortably into him, “giving a” thorough performance, “writes Gary M. Kramer at the Salon. He wants to focus more on Oleg Penkovsky, the Soviet agent who he uses Wynne to ferry intelligence to the West, played by a “solid” Merab Ninidze, and while Kramer criticizes the film’s “disabled” nature, “the joke that develops between Greville and Penkovsky is captivating.”
- “The Cuban Missile Crisis may be looming in the background, but we barely feel the threat,” because director Dominic Cooke “either can’t generate tension or simply chooses not to,” Jeannette Catsoulis writes in New York Times. Unfortunately, the film “stubbornly resists getting involved or affecting us until it’s almost over,” she writes. “By then, though, he might have fallen asleep.”
- However, Mick LaSalle does not seem to have been close to sleep. “As the pressures on Wynne increase and the missions become more dangerous, the spectacle of this ordinary man trying to stay safe becomes overwhelming,” he wrote in San Francisco Chronicle, applauding Cumberbatch’s “hard work.” He adds, “Tom O’Connor’s script strikes all the right notes, and Dominic Cooke’s direction highlights the unspeakable subtleties of the characters and their interactions.”
- Ann Hornaday argues that “modesty and carefully managed ambitions define her strong suit at a time when such films are rarer every day.” It’s “a lot of fun in the first hour and a half, while Cumberbatch makes the most of his humorous character” before a darker change that “isn’t always as graceful as what happened before.” However, it is a “good” film, Hornaday concludes Washington Post.
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