It’s Spooky how Homeland’s morphed into The Professionals
STRANGELY enough, this big-screen spin-off of the long-running BBC series Spooks appears to owe almost as much to Channel 4’s Homeland.
It even has David Harewood, who played the CIA chief in Homeland and perished in a terrorist attack, as a British intelligence bigwig who . . . well, let’s just say that Harewood seems to specialise in accidentprone spymasters.
There are other distinct echoes of Homeland, too, albeit in a British context, as a top terrorist is sprung from an MI5 convoy through the streets of London, enabling him to set up a bomb factory and mastermind a fiendish plot.
As in the TV series, Peter Firth plays the inscrutable Sir Harry Pearce, wrestling with moral quandaries and not always winning. He finds himself in a particular pickle here as he tries to find the identity
of the inevitable mole. Meanwhile, the derringdo is left to Kit Harington, still best known from telly’s Game Of Thrones. He plays a spy who comes in from the cold in more ways than one, a decommissioned former protege of Pearce’s who has wound up in Moscow, diving through plateglass windows for no obvious reason.
It’s pretty preposterous stuff, at its best reminiscent of Homeland, but at its daftest, rather evoking The Professionals of blessed memory. Still, Bharat Nalluri, who directed some of the TV episodes, delivers some tense action scenes, and there are lots of terrific shots of London.
Beyond that, a decent cast includes Jennifer Ehle, Tuppence Middleton and Tim McInnerny, reprising his TV role as one of those spooks who can’t open his mouth without being sardonic.
Whether that’s true to life, who knows? We can only hope that the ineptitude of the British security services, which more or less drives the narrative, very much isn’t.
Big Game is no less silly than Spooks, in fact quite a lot sillier, but tremendously enjoyable all the same. It is set in northern Finland, where a boy on the eve of his 13th birthday (the immensely engaging Onni Tommila) is sent into the woods to observe a time-honoured ritual; he has a day and a night to prove himself as a hunter, and come back a man.
Meanwhile, the U.S. President (Samuel L. Jackson) is overhead, being flown on Air Force One to a conference in Helsinki. Add one ground-to-air missile, some swarthy-looking bad guys and you have an adventure featuring the oddest of odd couples, a Finnish kid and the Leader of the Free World.
Just occasionally the script veers dangerously close to parody, and it’s very much a film for schoolboys of both the literal and overgrown varieties.
But it’s as exhilarating as it is ludicrous, with some memorable scenes between Jackson and young Tommila, and a lovely — if dodgy-accented — turn from Jim Broadbent as a CIA operative much more at home in a tank-top than a tank.