Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is one of the most incomprehensible, boring movies I’ve seen in a long while. The story is utterly confusing and the editing makes it nearly impossible to properly understand what’s going on.
The best I can manage is that after a botched intelligence retrieval mission, two heads of British Intelligence, Control (John Hurt) and George Smiley (Gary Oldman) are disbanded. But when it is suspected that there is a mole within British Intelligence, Smiley begins to investigate its heads, Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Roy Band (Ciarán Hinds), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) and Toby Easterhase (David Dencik). The name of the film comes from the code names given to each of the mole suspects by Control.
While watching this movie I felt like some sort of zombie, just blankly staring at the screen for two hours desperately grasping for something in the film to grab me and allow me to invest myself in the story. This never happened. I was shocked once the credits began to roll as I wasn’t even sure the movie had ended. I was just so mesmerized by the sheer uselessness of what I had just watched. On my way home I was trying to piece it all together in my head but it was no use. I actually ended up finally reading the plot on Wikipedia, only to realize that I actually did follow the film exactly was it was meant to be followed, and I still feel as if I gained nothing, not even information or a story, from the experience.
This film has some serious issues with its editing. A lot of the story is told in flashbacks but the dull, mumbling British accents of all the characters made it really hard to understand when and how this was happening. What’s more is there were several scenes in the trailer that did not actually appear in the film, making it even more perplexing. There is some modestly good acting from just about everybody involved, but there is just so much that happens that doesn’t seem to have a purpose. There’s a story involving a young student and I could never figure out what it had to do with the rest of the film. There was something about a lighter Smiley used to have, but again, I have absolutely no idea what purpose that served in the story. They keep showing footage from the botched exchange from the beginning of the film over and over again and I never gained anything from it other than the fact that I was really getting sick of seeing it.
It’s hard to write a review of a movie like this, where you just have absolutely no interest in anything going on and when it’s over you have no desire to ever see it again to find out just what the hell it was you watched. The acting is fine though and it has a great score, but other than that there is just nothing about this movie I would recommend at all. It would just be a waste of your time.
Final Verdict: 