Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The year is 1973 and the British government has just received intel that there is a mole within the Circus, the name given to the British secret service. In order to expose the mole the British government turns to a retired former agent named George Smiley. When Smiley was an agent he was the right hand man to the head of the agency, so the British government assume he's the right man for the job. Smiley has his work cut out for him this time because the mole is another agent, so they know every trick in the book to disappear without a trace. Smiley must work through deception after deception, not trusting anyone but his closest friends if he wishes to weed out the mole.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can easily be summed up in one word: BORING. Completely and utterly boring. The film begins at a slow pace but unfortunately continues this way the entire time. There is no dialogue until at least 10-15 minutes in, and because of this it's hard to tell what is happening onscreen. Tinker relies heavily on the characters' reactions and movements to tell the story. I've seen movies where this method works, but unfortunately it falls flat here. I found it hard to care what happened to the characters onscreen.

As far as content goes, for a R-rated film this is actually not as graphic or raunchy as it could have been. Violence-wise we rarely see any violence except for a couple of scenes where characters are shot; most of the graphicness comes from the agents committing murder and we only see the aftermath. One character has their throat slit so we see blood dripping down the front of their bodies; another character is shot in the back of the head, and we see the blood spatter on the walls. There is a scene in a strip club, but as far as I could tell we don't actually see anything there. The main issue is the language: we hear the f-bomb close to 10-15 times, as well as a couple uses of d--n, s---, and h---.

I had high hopes for this one, especially when I found out Gary Oldman was going to be in it. It had a promising premise, and what I thought would be a strong cast. Unfortunately, not even Gary Oldman or any of the other great actors could help this disaster of a movie. Let me put it this way: If you saw it for free you would be paying too much. It is THAT bad.