Old school spy thrillers are always the best. Not to take away from a James Bond movie, I’m still a huge of James Bond. But I’m even a bigger fan of classic spy thrillers set during the Cold War, stories that feel like a John Le Carre or Robert Ludlum novel. The Courier starring Benedict Cumberbatch feels like one of those classic spy thrillers and I have to say that it was a good movie. The story centers on a British businessman by the name of Greville Wynne who with his business connections in the eastern part of Europe started spying for MI6 and the CIA against the Russians along with his counterpart in the Soviet Union, Oleg, Penkovsky. As it turned out the two of them collected the largest amount of intelligence from the Soviet Union during the late 50s and 60s leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Penkovsky is considered the largest asset by the British in the United States when it came to foreign intelligence at that time. His true aim was to stop a nuclear war between the US and Russia and if it weren’t for the information that he turned over, the US and the British would not have known about the nuclear missiles Russia had put into Cuba. The film is a period piece but also very historically accurate, which makes it even more exciting. You could look at it as a historical dramatization, but in truth, it is much more than that because of the performances.

The performances are always the first thing that I look at when judging a film. Sometimes you can have films with great actors and they just phone it in. You know, like Michael Caine in Jaws 4. But when it comes to Benedict Cumberbatch, you generally get a good story because he’s an amazing actor. Let’s be honest has he ever been terrible in anything he’s done. Maybe that one night in a play that only a handful of people saw, but not in his movies. He was fantastic playing Greville Wynne, especially when his character is arrested by the Soviet Union and although this is a bit of a spoiler if you do not know the history, the character he played was kept in a Soviet prison for about 2 years. If you look at the archival footage of the real Greville, Benedict Cumberbatch for the most part is spot on when playing the character. But I also have to commend Merab Ninidze who played Penkovsky. The one person that was pleasantly surprising, not because she is not a great actress, but I think we are more used to her being in a comedic role such as the Marvelous Miss Maisel, and I am speaking of Rachel Brosnahan. She plays the female spy from the CIA who first recruits Greville to collect foreign intelligence. She is brilliant in the field when she is trying to help the Russian defect and trying to save Greville from the Russians… what truly makes this movie worth watching is the performances. And I think what also makes this film very good is how they captured that time.

You really feel like you are in the 50s and 60s at the height of the Cold War. If you enjoyed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has period piece, then you will definitely enjoy this. One of my favorite Espionage TV shows was The Americans which was on FX oh, I had the same feeling watching The Courier. But the film isn’t perfect and certainly has its problems. Even though the intensity of the film, especially the interrogation scenes, make you feel like you’re really in that time period, but there are still things about this film that keep it from being perfect.

I found the Courier to be repetitive a lot of times. There’s a good 15 minutes of this movie that feels like they’re trying to focus on the tradecraft or the exchanging of information, and showing you how it’s done instead of character development. I don’t know if we desperately need so many scenes showing us how they did it over the course of a few years. How many scenes do we really need of these characters having dinner and it looking like as a normal business dinner, when in fact they’re exchanging secrets. It’s almost as if they’re trying to make the movie longer than it should be or just fill time, kind of like its busy work for a movie.   These aren’t the strongest scenes in the film. It’s cool to see tradecraft, but it also takes away from the narrative at times. The strongest elements of storytelling in The Courier is when the characters are being vulnerable with one another and then of course the interrogation scenes where are their strength is torn down and their sense of humanity is taken away. It may be hard to watch at times, but you get these great performances especially when the two main characters get to say goodbye to each other as you know that Penkovsky will be executed soon. There’s this one moment between the characters where they take pride in knowing that what they did was right and they helped Stave off nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But because it becomes repetitive at times the pacing gets thrown off a little bit and perhaps this film could have simply lost about 15 minutes and then it may have been better. But even though you know the story and what’s going to happen, what makes this movie worth seeing is those vulnerable moments between the characters, which is usually the best performances.

I very much enjoyed this movie as an old school spy thriller. It does a great job of bringing us into the world of Cold War espionage and making us feel like we were there. The cast is great and they give us phenomenal performances to take us beyond it just a historical film. Even though most of us weren’t alive during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the intensity of what was going on at the time can be felt in this film because of those performances. Benedict Cumberbatch is great as usual and Rachel Brosnahan shines within her performance showing us that she can do more than just make us laugh. The Courier is a good film, not perfect, but still very much right up there with great espionage thrillers like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, early James Bond movies, and Three Days of the Condor. It takes me back to my childhood when my father got me into reading classic Espionage thrillers. I highly recommend this film if you like that sort of thing, but if nothing else just to see some great actors turn out some fantastic performances IN a historical drama that will make you feel like you were really there.