The Courier is the movie that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy promised to be (and failed miserably at). The excellent spy film starring Benedict Cumberbatch in yet another unique performance that only he could deliver was an unfortunate bit of pandemic collateral damage. It premiered in January 2020 at Sundance Film Festival under the title Ironbark, and was slated to arrive in theaters to a wider audience last year. That means it also missed Oscar contention for the 2020 contest, where The Courier easily would have been the best film. Because of a brief March 2021 theater push, it is apparently still in the running for 2022 ceremony, which makes it the only major contender for not only the best film, but also Cumberbatch’s performance. As the masses now finally get to see it, streaming to homes thanks to Amazon Prime (finally with an August release in both the U.S. and UK), we’ll just call it the best drama so far for 2021.
Perhaps it’s because The Hunt for Red October was such a fantastic story and film. It’s often in Hollywood that sequels are worse than the original, but with Tom Clancy screen projects it seems to be progressively so. Since Tom Clancy’s death in 2013 we’ve seen his Jack “Ryanverse” come to the screen twice, first on the big screen in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) with Chris Pine as Ryan, and later on the small screen in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (2018) on Amazon Prime with The Office’s John Krasinski stepping into the role of Ryan previously handled by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October (1990), Harrison Ford in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), and Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears (2002). Nothing anyone has tried has reversed the downward trend in quality, action, and intrigue, and that includes Amazon Studios’ new movie, Tom Clancy’sWithout Remorse. Even worse, the latest sequel is barely recognizable from Clancy’s original novel. Or his style.
Since Tom Clancy’s death in 2013 we’ve seen his Jack “Ryanverse” come to the screen twice, first on the big screen in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) with Chris Pine as Ryan, and later on the small screen in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (2018) on Amazon Prime with The Office’s John Krasinski stepping into the role of Ryan previously handled by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October (1990), Harrison Ford in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), and Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears (2002). In Clear and Present Danger, the second major Ryanverse character arrived in Willem Dafoe’s John Clark, later reprised by Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears. As was first done with Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, and later with Pine and Krasinski, the franchise is taking another step back in into the Clancy timeline for the next movie–a prequel, a direct-to-Amazon Prime feature adapting Clancy’s 1993 novel Without Remorse. That book and its new movie adaptation Without Remorse focuses on the origin of the John Clark character (initially introduced as John Kelly, as explained in the novel/movie), this time played by Creed and Black Panther’sMichael B. Jordan. Check out the trailer for the movie below.
At the beginning of Daniel Craig’s first foray as James Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale, Craig redefined Bond as viewers were taken back to his first kill, the event that earned Bond his 00 status. The scene instantly set the standard for the modern fight-or-die scene. This is the exact level of hand-to-hand combat viewers will be treated to in the new summer release, Atomic Blonde. Charlize Theron terrifically portrays what everyone always wanted to see: a woman in the role of James Bond. Sure, she has a different name, but Theron is believable just the same as a spy being interrogated by heads of MI6 at the end of a mission. As she tells her story, in every way she convinces us that she could go head-to-head with, and maybe even knock out Craig’s tough and bloody version of the Brit master spy. Only don’t think this is a typical Bond movie. It isn’t. It’s layered, more like The Usual Suspects or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, only better–less cerebral and more fun. And Theron chalks up another badass cinematic heroine, resulting in a film that is easily worth the admission price.
Based on Antony Johnston and Sam Hart’s 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City from Oni Press, Atomic Blonde follows the original, focusing on several nations’ spies trying to recover a secret list of agents being smuggled out of East Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Theron plays Lorraine Broughton, a no-nonsense top-level spy, with attitude and style, battered and bruised from some recent epic encounter when we meet her at the beginning of the movie. She’s being interrogated and debriefed by both British and American agency heads, with John Goodman (Argo, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Big Lebowski, Monsters, Inc.) as the American and Toby Jones (Captain America: The First Avenger, Snow White and the Huntsman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Doctor Who) as the Brit. What unfolds is a smartly constructed Cold War thriller, more complicated than Ian Fleming but not as complicated as John le Carré, but enough so that it may lose viewers a few times along the way. Ultimately Broughton finds herself trying to smuggle out of the country a German officer who memorized the secret spy list, played by Eddie Marsan (Sherlock Holmes, The Illusionist, V for Vendetta, The World’s End). The rewards and payoffs come not only at the resolution but in several scenes along the way, as Theron punches, kicks, hammers, fires, splatters, mows down, stabs, punctures… everything but bites her way through dozens of bad guys trying to kill her. The violence is extreme, but it all works–it’s great fun much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s or Chuck Norris’s blockbuster rampages in the 1980s–and it’s not gratuitous like a Quentin Tarantino bloodbath (blown-off heads aside).
The Atomic Blonde of the title comes from Broughton’s short, 1980s style hair, and that length allows us to see that much of the time Theron is actually doing her own punching, and taking plenty of punches, from all these men. She’s quicker, and she prepares herself for many of her punches and bruises by soaking in a tub of water filled with ice cubes–a concept that helps her more than once throughout the film. The story and action really kicks in as Broughton begins to smuggle Marsan’s character out of the country and as the steps are laid out in a subplot involving her mission to assassinate Satchel, a double agent known for selling secrets to the Soviets. It’s exciting like the real-life story told in Ben Affleck’s hit film Argo, where a spy smuggled a group of would-be hostages out of Iran in 1980. Atomic Blonde has less subtlety and nuance than Argo, but Atomic Blonde similarly displays an early, retro style of storytelling compelling enough to keep viewers interested. Does it feel like a comic book adaptation? Sure. Like History of Violence and Road to Perdition. In fact Broughton could be Hit Girl from Kick-Ass all grown up.
