The November Man (Dir. Roger Donaldson, 2014):
His name was Devereaux. It was his surname when he had not been in the Section. It did not matter what his Christian name might have been. He did not know, on the fifth of March, that a woman called Alexa was on her way to Switzerland to kill him.
— Bill Granger, “There Are No Spies”
Pierce Brosnan has always been an odd case: for someone all but genetically engineered to play the stalwart, suave leading man, he’s never been particularly convincing as a good guy. His breakthrough came with TV’s Remington Steele as the con man who is comically perfect passing himself off as an imaginary private eye, and the fidgetiness in that performance has leaked into all his subsequent roles. Even when he is supposed to be a smooth, polished, confident hero, there is always something behind his narrowed eyes which suggests that he’s not quite buying the notion that he is who he is supposed to be. Those layers of reticence are particularly fatal when it comes to playing James Bond (at least the cinematic Bond), who must be decisive if nothing else.
On the other hand, Brosnan excels at playing assholes: freed of audience expectations in The Matador and The Tailor of Panama, he got to let loose, and turned in some juicy performances. Now over a decade since his last Bond outing, he’s back playing what looks to be another asshole in The November Man, based on Bill Granger’s Devereux series. An underrated author, Granger sits on the exact midpoint in the spy fiction spectrum between Ian Fleming and John le Carré. Like Bond, Devereaux is resourceful and unstoppable; like le Carré’s heroes, Devereaux is a dyspeptic grump who has lost faith in the spy game, yet keeps finding himself drawn back in. Based on that set-up, the role seems perfect for Brosnan in his autumn years. Who wouldn’t want to see him as an even more jaded Bond after a few too many missions and martinis?
Too bad The November Man isn’t into that kind of commentary or approach. True, bits and pieces of the Bond iconography find their way in — the tailored shirts and jackets, a slinky female assassin, the post-Soviet Eastern bloc locales — but while Granger’s novel “There Are No Spies” (upon which the script is very loosely based) is essentially an elegy for the espionage game (“Everything that happened didn’t mean a damned thing to the world,” one of the characters sums up), the film goes for the trash compactor approach, throwing pieces of every spy thriller from the last twenty years onto the screen. You begin with CIA spook hero Devereaux in retirement after an opening mission goes very wrong (no bonus points if you guessed that “goes very wrong” includes an innocent child getting shot in slow motion). You have Deveraux called in for one last hurrah by his boss Hanley (Bill Smitrovich). You have an extraction operation that goes haywire, leaving Devereaux hunted by his old agency, including his young protegee Mason (Luke Bracey). You have an innocent woman (Olga Kurylenko from Quantum of Solace) that Devereaux must protect from a bevy of traitors and bagmen. You have Cold War-style conspiracies, foot chases and fisticuffs, baddies with Slavic accents, hammered dulcimers on the soundtrack… Still awake?
With a paint-by-numbers set-up like that, you basically have two options: pull out the jams on the action like Luc Besson does with his Eurotrash thrillers, or play the whole thing for satire, like Dean Martin with his Matt Helm movies. Once upon a time, director Roger Donaldson frazzled our nerves and went full-on wacko with No Way Out (1987); those days are long past. Po-faced to the end, Donaldson renders the action scenes with efficiency and little art. Liam Neeson proved in Taken that you don’t have to be under forty to kick ass, but physicality has never been Brosnan’s strong suit, and he ends up looking like Bourne on Geritol.
All of this wouldn’t matter so much if Brosnan had something to play, but every time the script has the opportunity to be inventive, it falls back on cliché. Deveraux’s character morphs from moment to moment, depending on what the plot requires. One minute he’s slicing an innocent woman’s femoral artery to get what he wants, and the next he’s getting misty-eyed over his teenage daughter back in Switzerland. “You feel the need for a relationship? Get a dog,” he snaps at the film’s outset, but that doesn’t prevent him from having a big breakdown when an old love gets killed off. “You’re a blunt instrument at best,” he later taunts Mason, and it’s the closest the film comes to taking a dig at the Bond franchise, yet we can’t help but notice that Devereaux, who never fails to take advantage of a moment to booze it up, somehow has no problem leaving dozens of bodies in his wake. The film’s politics, international and sexual, are retrograde: the Russians are slimy, corruption is eating away at the CIA, and every woman is either an assassin, a by-the-book pain in the ass, or a stripper. (Did we mention that Devereaux visits a strip club run by a former Russian mobster at one point? This sort of stuff was old in Jean Claude Van Damme movies twenty years ago.) When Mason’s new girlfriend turns out to just be a horny American and not a double agent, we’re almost pathetically grateful (though she gets that shiv in her femoral artery for her trouble). Even the graceful Kurylenko, initially presented as an ordinary do-gooder, is reduced to dolling it up in a neon-red wig and a short skirt for a pivotal scene.
One moment stands out: Devereaux confronting Mason, ready to slice up the latter’s girlfriend, with Brosnan finally cutting loose and playing the asshole he was meant to be. “Ask him if you’re worth saving,” Brosnan hisses into the woman’s ear, and for an instant, we catch a glimpse of what he (and the movie) could have been. “There are no happy endings,” Devreaux mutters at the conclusion of Granger’s book; in the world of the middlebrow Hollywood thriller, we have Brosnan sauntering into the sunset with Kurylenko and his daughter in tow. Once a good guy, always a good guy. ■
