Cold war Courier vs Old vs Invasion

I just watched and hated the movie 'Old' directed and written etc.etc. by M. Night Shyamalan of the Sixth Sense among other movies. I can understand that he is trying to recreate the movie moment of that earlier film where Bruce Willis suddenly realises something significant. 

This one (no spoiler) has everyone on a beach resort holiday where things start to get troublesome. It's the kind of resort where you arrive on a luxury minibus driven by Shyamalan, and are greeted with unusual cocktails then to meet the suave maître d'hôtel  who has only great personalised recommendations for everyone.

It turns into a kind of towering inferno script later when various family units have to resolve unexpected events and it is from around the occurrence of the first one that my brain engaged with the 'other possibilities' thinking, which is a characteristic of Shyamalan's movie making. 

I managed to speculate the 'other possibility' rather early in this case, but I won't explain it here. I really thought this movie more a misfire than anything towering. 

Speaking of towering inferno for a moment, it's also the playbook used in Invasion, a mini series which I found equivalently irritating, with its divergent cast all in various forms of jeopardy.

Sam Neill is the gnarly Sheriff in it and after a retirement from duty in the first episode, he seems to have gone Missing In Action for the next three reels. It is like he is in a different movie from everyone else. Apple must have a lot of money to throw at their productions, if this anything to go by. And now they have debugged everything with this one, they could be all set to make something brilliant. For this one, despite the epic trailers, I must confess to giving up 26 minutes from the end of Episode Four. 

I can't help but contrast this with the action and razor sharp story telling in that classic Fargo Series Two, when gnarly Sheriff Ted Danson gets to investigate the burger joint killings and that space object appears. 

So I was quite pleased to watch a properly good movie on Saturday night. It was the Benedict Cumberbatch cold war film set in a convincingly good 1960s London and Moscow, here Cumberbatch acts as a - er - courier for MI6. 

There is a timelessness to the scripting and direction of the piece which I found enjoyable. The modern camerawork, digital sheen and clever color grading give away that it is from the 21st Century, but the screenplay could be anytime. I think I'll watch it again in black and white. Cumberbatch plays a simple salesman/middleman fixer who knows the moves (be able to drink a lot, lose golf to the clients, show them the best clubs, do them little favours) and gets persuaded by an impressively empowered female from the CIA who manipulates the older men around her to get her way. 

It is supposed to be based upon the Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky story of 5000 documents being slipped to the British and American secret services at around the time of the Cuban missile crisis.   I didn't know of this breach at all, less publicised than the Kim Philby and Cambridge spy ring stories, and it still gave room for trade-craft and back-stories, which may be scripted licence. As a simple check, the pivotal woman from America was a fabrication and used to contrast old-boy network MI6 with the whipper-snapper upstart CIA.

An enjoyable modern classic.