In a way, their commitment matches the characters’ sacrifice, lending power to the last act.Ī theater director whose experience adapts well to cinema, Cooke once again inspires great work from his ensemble. From the looks of it, both actors lost a ton of weight for the time they spent locked up by Russian authorities, which leaves one duly impressed by their performances. As if to compensate, Cooke makes it a point to deliver a more impactful ending, despite the fact his two main characters are wasting away behind bars by this point.

You know who’s not suspicious? The Russians, with the result that “The Courier” feels a lot less exciting than it might have been, despite a scene when a traitor is shot in the head to make a point to Penkovsky and his fellow GRU officers.Ĭooke proves an inspired choice of director for such material (even if the material itself leaves something to be desired), considering the relationship-focused nature of his feature debut, the underrated “On Chesil Beach.” That picture delved into a newlywed couple’s marital problems, and worked quite well until the final stretch, when bad makeup and an awkward leap forward in time threatened to ruin everything. Here, the analogy becomes literal, not because there’s anything homoerotic at stake, but since we learn that Wynne had cheated on his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley) once before, which makes her understandably suspicious when he starts doing push-ups and disappearing on frequent business trips to the USSR. Trouble is, with all the sneaking around and secret-keeping involved, that’s more or less the default metaphor for illicit bromances, driving everything from Michael Mann’s whistleblower saga “The Insider” to the 3D chess game that was Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Screenwriter Tom O’Connor (“The Hitman’s Bodyguard”) seems to think he’s landed on something original by treating the bond that developed between Wynne and Penkovsky as an extramarital affair. Those might also be there if it had been done as a TV movie - and “The Courier” could well wind up a part of some streaming company’s slate - but director Dominic Cooke has a better budget to work with, and motivation to make the project cinematic. Normally, a movie like this would probably wind up on British television, but for whatever reason, “The Courier” has been made with the big screen in mind, which means audiences will benefit from a pair of terrific lead performances, handsome widescreen lensing (by Steve McQueen’s go-to DP, Sean Bobbitt) and a lovely waltz-like score (from Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski, who also did “Penny Dreadful”). Since Penkovsky was tasked with stealing Western technology secrets, his colleagues would view the relationship as being advantageous to Russia, not realizing that documents were flowing in the opposite direction. Rather than sending a trained agent to be his contact, they decided to recruit a civilian, who could come and go without attracting too much attention. They’d received word from Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), a high-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer, that he was looking for a way to leak information about the country’s nuclear program.

“The Courier’s” hook is that it’s based on true events, and the underlying history deserves to be shared.īack in the early 1960s, around the time the Cuban Missile Crisis put the United States on atomic alert, MI6 approached Wynne with an unconventional plan. Shaken martinis and martial-arts fight sequences tend to be a lot more sexy than watching whatever Cumberbatch, playing an English salesman named Greville Wynne, does to avoid suspicion in this intermittently interesting espionage drama - basically, going to the ballet, hosting business meetings, drinking with clients, while discreetly passing packages from a high-ranking Russian mole.

The courier 2020