All the Old Knives
Exploits and aversions to justice in secretive organisations with everything to lose if information leaves them is an old trick produced time and time again by the greats of the spy genre. To access that level of fear and intensity with such an overwrought process is a skill within itself. John le Carré made a career out of it. To keep it at that intensity is an awfully difficult challenge for any creative, and no greater a challenge is it than with All the Old Knives, a film that tries to explore the awful world of tense antiterrorism agencies within the CIA, but fails to navigate the avenues of internal subterfuge that are so frequently on display.
A game of whodunnit is afoot, with an all-star cast making up the pieces of an ever-growing problem that Henry Pelham (Chris Pine) is in charge of exposing. All the Old Knives may assemble Jonathan Pryce, Thandiwe Newton and Laurence Fishburne but what it does with them, their skills as performers and the weighty presence they have on the screen is what matters most. All the comfortable cliché is in place for director Janus Metz Pedersen’s work. Clinking glasses of rough whisky to turn in a difficult day of work and subterfuge, the back and forth between seemingly dependable characters and the acknowledgement that each has a secret to hide that may or may not have anything to do with the deaths of hundreds of people eight years ago.
All the Old Knives does not play fast and loose with that, but in its intense and brief set-up, where it pulls back the curtain too early and must then rely on flashbacks, it fails to understand the broader strokes of what makes a spy thriller so engaging. For all its stern talk and lavish camerawork, All the Old Knives never taps into an emotional core. It is a cold cut bit of work that sees its ensemble trade verbal blows back and forth without ever taking into account the underlying intensity that this musical score would hope to embed. There are only so many overhead shots and flashes back and forth between locations and timelines that can be set in motion before Pedersen finds himself in over his head and unable to cut through a fairly stop-start feature that belays the spy thriller sensibilities and doesn’t replace them with a strong alternative.
What is key to All the Old Knives is that the inevitable twists and turns follow a new path, and they do that. They have managed to create an atmosphere that does depend all too much on the old hat formula that it never quite gets to grips with, but at the same time, Pederson shows a flair for the indicative nature of this genre. The intensity it can provide, the smart wordplay that does become infused with strong performances, particularly from Newton and Pryce. That much can be found within All the Old Knives; although on the grand scale of plentiful spy thrillers, it will not last on the mind for very long as it tries to tackle terrorism with a touch of double-crossing.