All the Old Knives
It's another week and there's another Chris Pine thriller.
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It’s another week and there’s another Chris Pine thriller. (See my review for last week’s “The Contractor” here.) This week’s Pine offering is “All the Old Knives” (available in select theaters including Indianapolis’ Landmark Keystone Art Cinema and to stream on Amazon Prime beginning Friday, April 8).
Pine stars as Henry Pelham, a CIA analyst who’s been tasked by his boss Vick Wallinger (an underused Laurence Fishburne) with ferreting out the rat responsible for leaking intel to terrorists who killed over 100 people including themselves aboard Royal Jordanian Flight 127 eight years earlier. Their primary suspects are Bill Compton (no, not Stephen Moyer’s character from “True Blood” – it’s ace British character actor Jonathan Pryce … doing a lot with a little) and his protégé Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton), Pelham’s former lover who quickly fled the CIA’s Vienna station after the tragic incident.
Pelham’s investigation takes him from Vienna to London (where Pine and Pryce have a crackling exchange in a pub) to Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., where he’s reunited with Harrison for a sumptuous dinner at an idyllic winery from which only one of them is likely to emerge alive.
I see the appeal of both last week’s “The Contractor” and this week’s “All the Old Knives” to Pine. Each of them are thrillers geared towards adult audiences – attractive propositions in our IP-driven, comic book-crazed cinematic landscape. Neither film fully reaches its potential, but it’s not for lack of trying. Whereas the action in “The Contractor” took place on the streets; the action in “All the Old Knives” takes place between the sheets. Both Pine and Newton are good in the picture and have considerable chemistry, which is good as the meal shared between the two is the true thrust of the movie.
“All the Old Knives” does occasionally stumble into laughable territory. Pine is physically at his most Gary from “Team America: World Police” during flashbacks to eight years earlier. At one point Fishburne’s Wallinger barks the following order to one of his subordinates: “I want you to dig deeper into each of these assholes.” My snigger turned into a full-bore guffaw … yes, I’m a child.
As directed by Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) and scripted by Olen Steinhauer (adapting his own novel), “All the Old Knives” is a slick, slow burn exercise in spycraft that calls to mind the novels of John le Carré and the filmic works of David Mamet (far more in narrative as opposed to dialogue). There’s enough good here that it’ll likely appeal to patient filmgoers who’ve previously enjoyed the works from which this was inspired.