A Most Wanted Man - Philip Seymour Hoffman's last lead role :(

[Blinder Data]

Caught this last night. Having enjoyed 'Control' I was intrigued by AMWM, as it had appeared at myriad film festivals and garnered quite a bit of praise. I was interested in how Anton Corbijn would direct a thriller and its cast looked impressive (such as the aformentioned dearly departed Mr Seymour Hoffman).

This a warning thread for those who were thinking of seeing it and also a commisseration thread for those who have. I felt disappointed and led astray by the trailer. I thought it would be a tight, exciting thriller with lots going on. Instead I got Hollywood actors putting on German accents, a serious lack of action, overblown music and the feeling that it would have made quite a good TV movie, but not a two hour long thriller packed with A-list talent.

The tensest moment of the film is about

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a man signing over money to a disreputable shipping company

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! Perhaps I'm spoilt by the Bourne films but that does not get the heart pumping in quite the same way. And the final scene

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with the police taking away the terrorist and the Islamist funder

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felt like a great point to have in the middle of a plot or at the end of an episode, not the very end of a movie. Just as the film felt like it got going it decided to finish.

The performances are quite good, I suppose, but it's so plot-heavy there's little time for anything character-driven to come out apart from a few waffling moments where PSH looks lonely, smokes a cigarette and plays the piano. I also hope that this is the last new film I see set in a foreign country in which the actors speak english but with an accent. It's just silly and belongs in the past. I don't think it was just the accents that made the dialogue feel rather perfunctory and clunky, either.

If it wanted to be a low-key spy film with little action then it should have framed it in that way. Why have electronic strings every second to underscore the importance of unexciting tasks? Michael Clayton did it better.

5.5/10

[Harpo Speaks]

I really enjoyed PSH's perfomance, but I also found mysef feeling quite unengaged at points. The audience I saw it in seemed particularly restless as well. Looks good mind. But Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy managed to do the understated slow-burning spy 'thriller' much better in my opinion.

I'd tell anyone that was interested in seeing it to actively avoid the trailer - it basically hits every beat in the film and I was glad I didn't see it beforehand.

[Buelligan]

I thought it was very good.  Agreed, the accents let it down a bit but I loved the slow pace, some of the lingering camera shots (the glass of whiskey or whatever at the beginning was poetic). 

I liked the honesty of the film.  Definitely not a Bourne sibling, something far more real, which, to me felt more interesting and perhaps, important.  No goodies or baddies,

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except at the end when the US were revealed as the real monsters IMO,

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and a real sense of loss, lonliness and lack of resolution.  It left me with a acutely aware of the futility and utter negativity of the

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American approach to real or imagined opposition

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.  I think it spoke far more truly than most films of this genre about its subject.

I don't think it was the

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police, at the end, Blinder Data, who took away Issa and Dr Abdullah - it was the cunting Americans with the help of the German secret service

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.  And to me,

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Issa wasn't a terrorist

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.  I certainly didn't think that was established anyway, more

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just a poor innocent caught up in a monstrous game

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.