{"id":5877,"date":"2016-07-13T07:07:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T11:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5877"},"modified":"2016-07-26T07:31:11","modified_gmt":"2016-07-26T11:31:11","slug":"our-kind-of-traitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5877","title":{"rendered":"Our Kind of Traitor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Our

McGregor & Skarsg\u00e5rd, Our Kind of Traitor<\/p><\/div>\n

Our Kind of Traitor<\/em> is my kind of movie (trailer<\/a>). A political thriller that avoids the eye-rolling tropes of so many films in the genre\u2014the relentless testosterone-fueled special effects, vehicular mayhem, and beyond-evil bad guys. Instead, it relies for tension on the attachment it craftily develops between viewer and character, thanks to an excellent script and solid acting.<\/p>\n

Based on the 2010 John Le Carr\u00e9 novel, as adapted by Houssein Amini, and directed by Susanna White, Our Kind<\/em> is a movie about trust. While it shows that people at the highest levels of public trust may not necessarily have the public\u2019s good at the top of their agendas\u2014no news flash in this genre\u2014trust at the personal level is still possible. And trust is entails risk. Life-and-death risk.<\/p>\n

Low-key London academic Perry Makepeace (played by Ewan MacGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) are in exotic Marrakesh trying to revive a fading relationship. When she leaves him alone in a restaurant, he\u2019s befriended by a Russian at a neighboring table, Dima (Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd, brilliant!), who convinces him to go to \u201ca Russian party\u201d extravagant even by oligarchical standards. The next day Dima persuades Perry and Gail to drop in at his daughter\u2019s 16th birthday party, where it\u2019s just the usual\u2014you know, bands, fireworks, sword swallowers, bejeweled camels.<\/p>\n

At the party, Dima pulls Perry aside and confesses he\u2019s the chief money launderer for the Russian mafia and in imminent danger of being murdered in an internecine war. He gives Perry a flash drive and asks him to get it to MI6. He says a big bolus of dirty money is about to land on British shores by way of a shell bank headquartered in the Mediterranean. Dima wants to defect, and he wants the Brits to protect him and, most of all, his family.<\/p>\n

Plots featuring the \u201caverage man\u201d work because you inevitably wonder, \u201cwhat would I <\/em>do?\u201d The operational guys in the British security services (sly Damian Lewis, especially) like Perry\u2019s information, but the big bosses don\u2019t want them to follow up, for reasons of tangled agendas noted above.<\/p>\n

After that it\u2019s cat-and-mouse, with Dima and Perry two little mice and pretty much everyone else in the role of fat cats. Says critic Scott Marks<\/a> of the San Diego Reader<\/em>, \u201cThe mid-summer release of an adult, effects-free British thriller relating to the collapse of Europe\u2019s global financial system timed out perfectly. You\u2019ll Brexit knowing that your entertainment dollar was well spent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> critics rating: 67%; audiences 57%. The principal complaint seems to be that not much blows up (exactly what I liked about it!). Except of course, for people\u2019s lives. Don\u2019t believe the naysayers. It\u2019s a subtle gem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our Kind of Traitor is my kind of movie (trailer). A political thriller that avoids the eye-rolling tropes of so many films in the genre\u2014the relentless testosterone-fueled special effects, vehicular mayhem, and beyond-evil bad guys. Instead, it relies for tension … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Our Kind of Traitor - subtle gem of a spy thriller without the craziness","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,193,57,104],"tags":[560,556,557,558,559,415],"class_list":["post-5877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-espionage","category-movies","category-the-morgue","tag-damian-lewis","tag-ewan-mcgregor","tag-john-le-carre","tag-our-kind-of-traitor","tag-russian-mafia","tag-thriller"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1wN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5879,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5877\/revisions\/5879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}