The Courier is an espionage thriller, based on real events, happening at the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the most part, director Dominic Cooke and writer Tom O’Connor provide what it takes for their historical story of avoiding Armageddon to be engrossing and entertaining. Benedict Cumberbatch is brilliant as Greville Wynne, a meek British salesman sent to Moscow to retrieve indispensable intelligence from Soviet Col. Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) in hopes to halt nuclear warfare.
It is indeed a life-or-death covert operation, but that doesn’t really sink in initially for Wynne when recruited by MI6 and the CIA (respectively represented by Angus Wright and Rachel Brosnahan). Their thinking is that Wynne is the perfect person to do this as no one will suspect him to be a spy. I mean just look at the guy! All he has to do is be himself and act as if it’s business as usual. Easy-peasy.
Visit after visit, handshake after handshake, Wynne and Penkovsky are able to form a fantastic friendship that goes beyond politics. That tends to happen when two ordinary men are doing something extraordinary to make the world a better place. As far as their families go, obviously the less they know, the better. Though Wynne’s wife (a primo Jessie Buckley) is quickly skeptical of these secretive business trips to Moscow and the changes she notices in her husband after he returns. It doesn’t help that Wynne had an affair in the past, so it’s only natural his faithfulness to her comes immediately into question.
The truth of the matter is no matter how secretive Wynne and Penkovsky try to be, the KGB is always watching. The dangers of their mission close in tighter and tighter around them, which of course is the great suspense of any spy movie. Howbeit, after the spying and heist action is done, The Courier hits a wall in the final stretch with its isolation and time jumps. There’s a shift in tone that causes our interest to go down a notch or two. Still, the committed performances have a way of pulling us back in.
Ninidze is sensational as the Russian counterpart to Benedict’s Wynne. As Penkovsky, he’s putting his life on the line to betray his own country to serve the better good for humanity. If that’s not one of the gutsiest things one can do, then I don’t know what the hell is. His and Wynne’s relationship play a key part in The Courier raising the emotional stakes during a terrifying time.
If Cooke and O’Connor took more risks in their working of Wynne and Penkovsky’s heroism, we’d have something great on our hands. But they made certain to never let the human element in all of this get entirely displaced. And for that, The Courier is more than just standard operating procedure.
Brandon Vick is a member of The Music City Film Critics’ Association, the resident film critic of the SoBros Network, and the star of The Vick’s Flicks Podcast. Follow him on Twitter @SirBrandonV and be sure to search #VicksFlicks for all of his latest movie reviews.
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