A Most Wanted Man – Movie Review

A Most Wanted Man – R
Release Date: Sat 02 Aug 2014

This movie wants us to believe it is a thriller. Unfortunately it fails to do anything even remotely thrilling for the bulk of its cliched, boring 122-minute running time. There may have been great intentions and a wonderful source to draw from, but the adaptation is so fundamentally broken that it keeps this movie from having any sense of stakes, danger or action.

Each scene seems to be lifted out of the novel without context. Spies stop listening to conversations at critical points; Not because they need to rush off to do something, but because the lines of dialogue have been spoken and now the scene is over. This constantly breaks any hope at the illusion that there’s more of a world than the handful of characters that appear in the film.

The climax itself is actually a perfect storm of frustration. The point of the film seems to be that nice guys can finish last and that the twist is that the mustache-twirling villains we’ve been shown have been simple, mustache-twirlers all along. They show up for the last time to leave dramatically after the final line of dialogue. Our hero wanders dazedly off the screen. We walk out of the theaters wondering what could have been.

Hannah and I saw it in the theater had a discussion in the car: