Tuesday 12 May 2015

Film Review: Spooks: The Greater Good

I Spy With My Little Eye...


If 2015 is year of the blockbuster, with Furious 7 already in the top four of highest-grossing movies ever and Avengers: Age of Ultron slowly making its' way into similar box office territory, there is no surprise really that 2015 also brings with it a vast range of films that focus on the old-school favourite theme of spies and espionage, with Kingsman: The Secret Service being released earlier in the year, whilst Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E and Spectre all set to come out in the second half of the year, with all being odds on to make quite a substantial bit of dosh, particularly Spectre which will no doubt be the one that everyone will be anticipating the most.  For now however, we have the release of Spooks: The Greater Good, the big-screen adaptation of the popular BBC programme, featuring Kit Harrington, Jennifer Ehle, and Peter Firth, who reprises his role as Harry Pearce from all ten seasons of the programme in its' run between 2002 and 2011, and its' fair to say that Spooks more than holds its' own in the vast canon of spy movies, even if it remains in an overarching shadow of much more popular movies that have come before it. 


Part Bourne, part Bond, Spooks adheres to the expected tropes of any decent paranoia-filled spy movie with its' interweaving narrative focusing on the simultaneous plots of MI5's pursuit of Pearce after he is suspected of corroborating with escaped terrorist Adem Qasim, and Pearce himself, who attempts to discover a suspected mole within MI5 who may have been behind Qasim's escape in the first place. Between the two is Kit Harrington's Will Holloway, who after being discharged from MI5 years previously is tasked with locating Pearce in an attempt to prevent potential terrorist attacks on London, leading to a constant shift of allegiances between those in power and those on the run. With solid acting and rather enjoyable action sequences throughout, Spooks: The Greater Good succeeds in being an entertaining 100 minutes of London loving, not stopping long enough to question certain plot points whilst having too many similarities to previous spy efforts to be classed anything other than solid. 

Overall Score: 7/10





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