The November Man

An efficient, if not exactly inspiring, espionage thriller, full of high-tech gadgetry (surveillance drones! flash drives!) and low-tech action (car chases! shootouts! a shovel to the head!).

Though the film's cat-and-mouse scenes hardly compare to those in a Bourne movie, they're enjoyable and only occasionally ridiculous.

The November Man is one of those thrillers that grows progressively more incoherent, and it simply isn’t fast enough to glide over its gaping narrative holes.

As far as the spy genre goes, Pierce Brosnan’s The November Man is more filler than thriller.

The November Man doesn’t pause for a moment’s breath, which tightens up the action at the expense of clarity, character development, wit, politics, themes, subtext, and all the other things that can go into a thriller besides bang-bang and crash-crash.

Even in the lazy days of late August, this movie is hardly worth the price of popcorn.

This one resembles a James Bond film about as much as Belgrade resembles London.

This review is for people who want to go and see the November Man with Pierce Brosnan, and are somewhat put off by the reviews. I'd arranged to go to see this film and set about reading reviews on the internet. After reading a lot of reviews I almost cancelled our night out because they were generally artsy or negative. I have a pet peeve with professional film critics who seem to have forgotten why we, the paying public go to see a movie. Some of my favourite movies were absolutely slammed by these so called experts, Jack Reacher for example, anyway I'm really glad I went to see the November Man, because I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone. Go to see it and make your own mind up!

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Typical retired spy movie with some typical spy/secret agent drama. Pierce Brosnan does a decent enough job at performing as an older shadow of his previous role as agent 007. The intrigue is not as predictable as I initially thought because there IS a little twist to it. Otherwise, it's run-of-the-mill spy stuff except without a lot of fancy high-tech gadgets. Not bad, but not great either.

When Pierce Brosnan was playing 007, he said in interviews he wanted to do an edgy darker version, even R rated to get back to the spy thriller's origins. Maybe Daniel Craig's is that more or less, and supposedly this movie is Pierce's attempt years later. Unfortunately for him, it's a disaster. Phony, cheap, disjointed, incoherent, mind numbingly boring and poor style all come together here. Note to the director: the hand held quick zooms and over-used over-the-top blood spatter helped ruin the poorly scripted film. Note to writers: your interview in the making-of doc have you saying "we don't know what November Man means" despite the fact it is precisely spelled out as to what it means in your own dialogue in the film! How stupid can you get?

I'm a big Pierce Brosnan fan and after seeing the movie, it simply didn't have the energy and structure of an action or spy movie. It was filled in with too many pointless and inconsistent moments, both of the star characters, including Brosnan, felt like they were only putting in so little effort it was noticeable. There was a lot of talking, the story didn't make sense or engrossing at a lot of times, and some facepalm moments at what the characters were doing. The only reason I give it a 3 is because the last quarter of the movie was half-decent and delivered close to par and got my interest, but if the movie was revolved more around the pace of this last quarter it would've delivered a much better movie, probably soaring it to a 6 or 7 at least. But that's considering someone stays to watch it that long because a couple of people did walk out of the movie theater because of an obnoxious sex scene that confirmed their belief it was a terrible movie and a very brutal stab scene, with the latter even making me consider myself to walk out because it was a big 'WTF' moment. Overall, I wouldn't recommend it, even for a Pierce Brosnan fan even being one myself, the structure was very boring, unfulfilling, and messed up in places, and this is coming from someone who happens to like a lot of movies and rather forgiving on some of the less liked movies.