A Most Wanted Man (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

A Most Wanted Man (2014) – A. Corbijn

Before I found out that this was the filming of a John Le Carré novel, I thought to myself that Philip Seymour Hoffman seemed (at times) to be channelling Richard Burton from in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. However, director Anton Corbijn makes drab seem almost too cool with his photographer’s eye and color coding schemes that might be a bit too ostentatious.  Le Carré’s plot successfully brings together a few different strands linking asylum seekers, terrorism, the money trail, the CIA, and a couple of German police or spy agencies in Hamburg and echoes the earlier films of his Cold War work more so than any more recent depictions of Islamist terrorism and the Western response.  In order to interact with the actual German cast (speaking English), the Hollywood actors here try on some German accents, to various degrees of success.  Hoffman, in his final film, inhabits the central spy impressively, though you can’t quite forget it’s him.  A bit too pat to be fully satisfying but still enjoyable.