The set-up: Osbourne "Ozzie" Cox (John Malkovich) quits his job as a mid-level CIA operative to write a memoir. Just watch it, why don’t you? It’s just as funny now as it was upon release twelve years ago, and the never ending Russiagate debacle only adds prescience to the film's Cold War mindset. Think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy crossed with Four Lions, and… you’re still pretty far away, actually. The Cohen Brothers’ star-studded farce Burn After Reading, however, aims its satire at the paranoid incompetence of so-called intelligence agencies, and the scheming dunces who fall foul of them in search of an easy dollar.
Spy parodies tend to send-up the slickness of secret agents, the vanity of super villains and other Bond-inspired movie tropes. Keaton reflected toward the end of his life that he "was more proud of that picture than any I ever made." The General might be a comedy, but the way that it pitches an ordinary man into a dangerous political intrigue is pure spy thriller material, and Keaton's commitment to his own wildly dangerous stunts echoes in Tom Cruise's eye-boggling latter-day Mission: Impossible work. He gives chase in another loco, and a series of increasingly spectacular stunts and set pieces ensues. Desperate to sign up for the Confederates during the American Civil War to impress his beloved – yeah, not a tremendous decision – Keaton's train driver Johnnie finds himself spurned when he's turned down for service.īut then his other beloved, the locomotive The General, is stolen by Union spies. The spy just happens to be being played by the most gifted comic actor who ever lived. You've seen the bit where Buster Keaton bonks a railway sleeper out of the way with another railway sleeper watch the whole thing, though, and you'll see it's a proto-spy film. Robert Pattinson wears some lovely suits too. Whether it makes sense and what actually happens in the end is the wrong question to ask it's really a mega-budget attempt to invert blockbuster cinema at large. When Protagonist (yep) is recruited by a shadowy organisation which has the technology to manipulate time, he's tasked with taking out the villainous Sator who wants to save the world by turning it all backwards and destroying it. But with a little bit of distance, it all feels less like Nolan's audition for a Bond film – though there were definitely nods and winks here and there – and more like a genre-bending attempt to launch a sensation straight into your brain. (It was a deliberate artistic choice! Actually!!) Tenet was the first Christopher Nolan thinky-thriller to really split opinion. The release schedule knackered by the pandemic and everyone's ears were knackered from straining to hear what anyone's saying through the haze of noise and rumbling which permeates the whole thing.
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