SPY-FI THRILLER IS MIND-BOGGLING GOOD
Tenet (cinemas, 12A)
Verdict: Get back, back to the movies ))))*
THE blockbuster that’s supposed to bring light to thousands of darkened cinemas around Ireland is out now — and worth the wait. Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller is a mind-boggling and timebending spectacle which will leave audiences high on kinetic energy.
The no-expense-spared action includes a bullet-pumping bunker bust, a crash staged using a real Boeing 747, and astonishing car chases that literally enter another dimension.
It stars John David Washington, pictured, as a US secret agent called The Protagonist, and Robert Pattinson as his deceptively languid British counterpart Neil. They try to foil Andrei, a psychotic ex-Soviet arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh with a hokey accent) who has dastardly plans. So far, so Bond.
But Nolan takes the spy game to chess grandmaster level, as time inverts in a parallel universe. The British director has played similar tricks in previous films Interstellar and Memento, but there is surprising pleasure here in seeing events reel crazily backwards. Even the film’s title is a palindrome.
Washington (BlacKkKlansman) is a smart, muscular hero, as comfy dispatching foes in SWAT team gear as he is in a Savile Row suit. Pattinson leaves Twilight behind as a too-cool-for-public-school chap with a steely interior.
Elizabeth Debicki plays Andrei’s wife Kat, an elegant English rose gone rampant, trapped in a marriage which takes coercive control to new heights.
But there’s barely time to catch your breath as Tenet bounces from India to Estonia, Norway to London, with a stopoff on a superyacht moored off Italy. The clever, exhilarating comeback that cinemas have been hoping for.