Imagine you are on this wonderful holiday with your wife, trying to make things work out, especially after she has come to know of your side-kick affair with a younger woman but is willing to make a few sanctions and try things out again. And then you meet this loud-mouth Russian bear of a creature that has money to splurge and offers you to come for a private party? Would you do it?
I guess you would. Knowing the kind of man you are, for thrills, even though you’re just a college Professor, you would. Why? That’s just it! Human beings are the most complicated individuals and we would do a whole lot of things ‘just like that’.
But what one would not expect is at that party of booze, women and mafia dons, this Russian chief would hand you a thumb drive and tell you to hand it over to the British Intelligence (MI6) when you land back in London and open an absolute can of worms- corruption, deceit, money and death.
Susanna White’s Our Kind Of A Traitor running at 107 minutes based on the novel by John le Carré has a thrilling opening, just like the one described above.
Lecturer Perry MacKendrick (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) get the drive to MI6 at London and assume that all is over, but its just the tip of the iceberg and they are drawn into a vortex of chess-like-games as negotiators for the simplest of all reasons, they are not spies and will never be suspected of an intelligence-cum-mafia liaison, playing both god and sinners.
When Perry is cajoled by investigating officer Hector (Damian Lewis) to attend this set-up, bump-in meeting with the Russian Dima (Stellan Skarsgård) just once, little does he know that both he and his wife will get more than what they bargained for.
Dima and Perry strike a friendship and what moves Perry is that all Dima is asking for is the safety of his wife and daughter, for he knows that the new Chief who is shifting all the ‘blood money’ through a new bank to London.
Now when we talk of all this kind of monies, can any of our ‘beloved’ politicians be left behind? Well, that’s also the case here. There are some top level politicians involved – Aubrey Longrigg (Jeremy Northam) and there is bound to be plots and sub-plots. I say, the more the merrier!
It’s not easy being of help to anyone these days and Our Kind of A Traitor, perhaps dwells very close on those lines, but then there is integrity and the choice of being the kind of man/ woman you would want to actually be- stand up for the values which define you or be one with the flow of things? At the end of the day the choice is yours.
More than just being the thriller that it is Our Kind of A Traitor takes you beyond and actually questions moralities of people, the choices we make and most importantly what would you centre your life around?
From me this is a sure watch – so get that bag of pop corn and ice-cream and get to the lending library to get your Blue Ray copy!