Casting Pierce Brosnan in a spy movie is kind of a cheat if you think about it. One flick of a ballpoint pen on a piece of paper with the word “Contract” at the top and you’ve instantly got yourself a James Bond movie, by default, whatever the hell name his actual character has. From a marketing perspective that’s probably a wise move, since a lot of people grew up loving his run in the James Bond franchise and would like to pretend that they’re seeing more of them, but you’ve still got to deliver an actual movie afterwards. Preferably a good one.
Unfortunately, the best The November Man can do is throw a bunch of old discarded James Bond storylines and impenetrable Tom Clancy techno-political jargon into a hat and pull them out at random, filming them in no particular order and hoping it gets away with it. Brosnan is pretty great as a Cold Warrior with flexible morality and a few secrets up his sleeves, but he’s trapped in a scatterbrained rehash of From Russia with Love, with all of the Russia and nothing to love.
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Brosnan plays Devereaux, a retired CIA agent called back out of retirement for – stop me if you’ve heard this one already – one final mission.
Oh, you’ve heard this one already? Well then let’s skip around a bit.
Brosnan’s mission goes sour and he winds up shooting a bunch of CIA agents led by his former stupid. Er, “student,” sorry. His name is Mason, he’s played with doe-eyed haplessness by Luke Bracey, and he’s so borderline incompetent that Devereaux once even recommended he be taken out of field duty. The November Man turns into a cat and mouse tale of Devereaux and Mason chasing each other – Mason does it badly – and almost becomes an interesting movie if you imagine it from the novice hero’s perspective. The November Man isn’t just From Russia with Love, it’s also Goldeneye if it were told from Sean Bean’s point of view, and if he wasn’t trying to rob a bank.
Related: Luke Bracey on ‘The November Man’ and ‘The November Man 2’
What Devereaux is actually trying to do is foil a wide-reaching conspiracy involving a terrorist attack in Chechnya over a decade earlier, prevent the future Russian president’s pet assassin from murdering a key witness to the crime, and root out a mole in the CIA who will probably turn out to be the person who is acting like a mole the whole time. Along the way he joins forces with Alice (Olga Kurylenko), a social worker with the second-most obvious secret in the film. There are a lot of foot chases that end with the pursuer getting clotheslined from around a blind corner. I think it happens at least three times.
Roger Donaldson is a pretty straightforward director who can work wonders with a decent script. Too bad there wasn’t one. The panache Donaldson brought to The Bank Job is completely absent here, leaving The November Man devoid of any particular style and forcing his film to rely on our nostalgia for Brosnan’s other, better spy movies to pull us through all the lame twists and old hat spy clichés.
If it were a Bond movie, it would be one of the worst, and that’s saying something. But it’s not a Bond movie, of course. It’s The November Man. Unfortunately, it’s also worst November Man: a spy movie with nothing to contribute to the genre and nothing thrilling to distract us from its confused mediocrity.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
