This Le Carré story promised to be quite satisfying. The film’s pretty good. I like the direction, half slick Hollywood shots, half arty hand-held camera tracking, though always flowing smoothly. The acting was great – more natural than I’d expected, which was a treat. And the story was very good, and very believable: a man’s wife is killed in Africa, and in unravelling the reasons for it, he discovers a conspiracy involving pharmaceutical companies, greed and contempt for African life.
Somehow, though, it wasn’t as good as 20th Century Boys is. Not because the conspiracy is just commercial and the stakes are just the lives of the central characters (as opposed to global, with all sorts of apocalyptical possibilities floating around) – in fact, that’s where it improved on Urasawa’s rather cheesy work. It’s not because it pretends not to be cool. All the standard crime thriller scenes are in there, from men coming to beat up the central character as a warning to grisly death to men you think are out to kill the main character actually turning out to be trustworthy and helping them in a very earnest scene. It’s cheesy and predictable in its own way, and that’s not necessarily a failing. But the trouble is, there was nothing driving the plot. There’s a few vague clues, and no sense of anything about to happen, no real big revelations, no sense of unravelling. It was enjoyable, and a good story, but there was just not quite enough to it, with the result that it was a bit dull.
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