All the Old Knives: Film Review
I love Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton so I was keen to check out them in the spy thriller All the Old Knives, and while they are excellent, I really struggled to get into this movie.
Pine plays Henry Pelham, a CIA agent stationed in Vienna who is tasked with finding out which of his colleagues gave information to someone involved in hijacking a plane in 2012. Everyone on board was killed during the Flight 127 disaster and the failure still haunts the CIA eight years later. He tracks down his former colleague and lover Celia (Newton) in California and interrogates her over dinner to see if she leaked the important information.
Most of the film takes place inside a fancy and almost empty restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea in 2020. It focuses on Henry and Celia going through their CIA history, the days leading up to the hijacking disaster and their movements in Vienna during the ongoing hostage situation. These recollections are usually paired with flashbacks to 2012 as they narrate what happened.
Due to this narrative structure, Pine and Newton are often lumbered with huge dumps of exposition as they have to explain the context of so much before the juicy stuff can get underway. I know the audience needed this information, but it made no sense for those characters to do such a thorough postmortem of the tragedy since they were lovers at the time – surely they already know most of this stuff?! There is a lot of information to take on board all at once as Olen Steinhauer – adapting his own book – regularly breaks the golden “show don’t tell” screenwriting rule.
I found it a struggle for a while as it clumsily jumped timelines and locations for a bit before settling into the two – 2012 Vienna and 2020 Carmel. But even then, the narrative still felt quite clunky, the storytelling was convoluted and hard to follow at times and I couldn’t help but think there must have been a simpler and more effective way to tell this story.
Admittedly, it got more interesting as it went on but it didn’t fully grip me or become the thriller it claimed to be until the last 30 minutes. The excitement ramped up as we got closer to the big whodunnit reveal. I liked the revelation and what happened afterwards (no spoilers here) but it also rendered some of the earlier conversation pointless.
Pine and Newton do subtle yet brilliant work here. They are mostly sat having a chat over a meal but they make it very watchable. I enjoyed seeing the former lovers reconnect after eight years and establish who betrayed who. They are supported by Laurence Fishburne as the CIA Vienna boss Vick Wallinger and Jonathan Pryce as Bill Compton, another agent under suspicion.
All of Old Knives, directed Janus Metz, comes to a satisfying conclusion but you have to wade through the muddled storytelling to get there.
On Prime Video from Friday 8th April