I really had high hopes for this film. As a huge James Bond fan, this actioneer promised some pretty neat thrills and chills, a kind of James Bond meets Jason Bourne kind of thing. The movie certainly delivers on the action. The plot, well, that's another story entirely.
The November Man opens with a CIA team led by a very English-sounding Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) leading a CIA team on a mission to protect the U.S. Ambassador in Montenegro from assassination. Part of the team is Devereaux's protogė Mason (Luke Bracey). Mason is still being trained to be an operative and although the mission is a success, Mason's impetuousness results in a child being killed. We then fast forward 8 years to the present where we find Devereaux has retired and is running a cafe in Switzerland. An old boss and friend visits him one day and asks for help in getting a source out of Russia, one of Devereaux's old cases. This is an unsanctioned mission as the source is targeted for assassination by a CIA team, led by who we find out later to be Mason. Devereaux accepts the assignment out of a personal responsibility he feels to protect her, but he fails. But before she dies, she tells him there is a plot between a high-level CIA person and the Russian president-elect. This sets off a dangerous cat-and-mouse game between Devereaux and the CIA, with the fate of the world in the balance.
As I have said many times in the past, story is everything. Everything else can be right, but if the script is bad, the movie suffers no matter how good everything else is in the film (Star Wars prequels anyone?). The sad thing is, this movie actually has great potential. The story is sound and engaging. It has a couple of twists that are fun, and unlike many other films of this type, has something to say regarding issues of real importance today that seem to get forgotten. In this case, one of the big underlying issues is the problem of human trafficking in Eastern Europe in particular. A key witness was abducted for two years and she holds the key to CIA/Russia nexus. But as good as the setup is, it goes off the rails quickly in the telling. The problem is that the movie is not very good at exposition. We are dropped right in the middle of a very complicated story without any real background on the motivations of anyone in the film and this leads to a lot of confusion. The movie instead prefers to let us in on important details as surprise plot twists which, instead of being the point where you shout out, "Aha! It all fits now!" to just further muddying the plot. In this movie, motivations are extremely important to understand why things are happening. Devereaux is on a kill-crazy rampage to try to find out why the source was killed in Russia. He also seems very interested in humiliating Mason and helping him alternatively. Mason, for his part, is alternatively trying to kill Devereaux and helping him. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's as if the scriptwriters were writing as they go, making more and more preposterous leaps.
It's too bad this movie falls kind of flat. There are some good stories in here. If they would stick to one or two, it probably would have been a superior movie. As it is, it is worth watching, but in the end, pretty disappointing from the letdown of how good it promised to be.
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