A-List: Best Modern Spy Movies
By J. Don Birnam
July 28, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And as I was preparing to make the list of best spy movies ever I was quickly crushed under a barrage of bullets and fake passports - it would be nearly impossible to distill the wheat from the chaff. Three Days of the Condor? Notorious? Or all of Alfred Hitchcock’s films? Watching four chase scenes across a multitude of cities in the new Bourne movie stressed me out enough.
So the rule for this column will be thus: the movie has to be a 21st Century movie, and it can’t be a Bourne or a James Bond film. Let’s think a bit outside the box of that Terrible Century and look at the best the latest generation of snoop flicks has to offer.
If you’re the Spy Who Loved, or Hated Me, tweet me about it here. Before I get there, though, some honorable and dishonorable mentions. Bridge of Spies is a superb movie, and it makes a top list of anything any day. Except is it really about spies? It’s more like undercover diplomats, isn’t it? So I left it off for that reason. And 2012 Best Picture winner Argo is one of the worst, in my opinion, in a long time. I even said so in my latest analysis of the Best Picture slates! So while, yes, Affleck and gang are definitely infiltrators on a secret mission, you won’t ever see me list this movie high when other options abound.
Oh, and J. Edgar is pretty bad too, sorry Clint.
5. The Good Shepherd (2006)
This movie was first panned by critics but I expect it may get a second look years down the line. Directed by no other than Robert De Niro, who also stars along with - who else!! - Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, the movie is basically about the rise of the CIA from the small days as a Yale secret society around the elder Bushes.
Set against the backdrop of Nazism, World War II, and the rise of the Soviet Union, the movie poses the question that more hooky spy movies ask today: what price would you pay to protect your country? To save yourself in the eyes of a threat? The movie is brutal in its answers: anything.
It shines, too, because it helped Damon polish his acting as the thoughtful, meticulous, ruthless spook. Calculating, meticulous, and unshakably cold to a fault, Damon is not afraid to betray love, family, and fatherhood for the ultimate goal he’s convinced himself is for the greater good.
A movie like The Good Shepherd, in many ways like many Bourne movies, is almost like a horror movie - it’s a scary concept to have a human act so much like a machine, so devoid of emotion and so devoted to emotive ideas. Spies in a film like this one are more than just sexy vixens trapezing around Europe and conquering the girl. They’re lean, mean killing machines.
4. Munich (2006)
Speaking of Spielberg movies, this one is definitely deserving of the fourth spot. Yeah, the Olympics revenge movie is not exactly about espionage per se, in the sense that the plants aren’t looking for a secret code or to stop an evil plan. They’re looking for payback. Eric Bana is beefier and bulkier than Damon, so clearly he’s scarier. And he means business.
And also speaking of scary spy movies, how about Spielberg’s mastery of suspense, action, tension, and darkness? Unlike your typical Bourne car chase scene, or the normal Bond close escape, you really don’t know where or when the explosion or the gunshot is coming here.
But the motivations of the actors here are really what make this movie so memorable - sure, saving the hypothetical world is cool, and Nazism is bad, no doubt. But terrorist attacks in the Olympics - yikes. If that doesn’t speak to the anxieties of today, well…then just ask the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, I guess.
3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
And now for a completely different program. From beefy face-punchers to scrawny braniacs. From heart-pounding chase scenes to analytical puzzles.
Yeah, but, come on, don’t you just love the endless cat and mouse that John Le Carre plays with you? The ceaseless hunt for the mole?
Gary Oldman finally received a much overdue Oscar nomination for his portrayal of George Smiley, a British intelligence agency caught in the middle of an espionage ring during the heart of the Cold War. The classic type of spy novel is perhaps the best because of the pointlessness of it all. Two nations, two ideologies, caught in the middle of a fight that tore people asunder for no real reason.
But these men who had caught themselves in the webs of lies, deceit, and betrayal did soldier on. And this one even has clandestine gay sex. Not to mention a crazy good cast - Tom Hardy? John Hurt? Toby Jones? Benedict Cumberbatch (in one of his earliest roles)? Director Tomas Alfredson puts a bow on top of the thrilling, chilling story by the master himself with subtle and beautiful '70s cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema, Inception), specious art direction, and boney music (Albert Iglesias).
Can we have another, please?
2. The Lives of Others (2006)
It’s with a lot of bitter regret that I place the 2006 Best Foreign Language winner from Germany on the second spot of this list.
But the neo-noir spy movie made in Germany about East Germany reminds us of a topic that was beginning to bubble in 2006 and that is chillingly timely today: spying on each other. Where the new Jason Bourne movie plays fast and loose with government espionage and surveillance, this movie reminds us the all-too-real costs of it happening, even at a time of far less technological ability.
In case you don’t know, the movie centers around a Stasi domestic spy in East Germany, tasked with surveilling his neighbors to make sure that they aren’t thinking of defecting, or worse. In an absolute creepy manner, he becomes infatuated with the sexual and sometimes rocky marriage of his younger neighbors. Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, if you will.
But the consequences for all of them are not what you think they’ll be - or perhaps they are, as the movie makes no effort to hide its somber, dark undertones. It is a German movie, after all.
The shocking and unexpected last few sequences feel like a horrific punch to the stomach, even if you’d already been lulled from disgust into oblivion. The basic point is that when the immense powers of invasion of privacy are turned against one another, we lose our humanity and our liberty, and risk losing a lot more.
1. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
You may have heard that a woman has been nominated to be President (after 240 years).
Back in Hollywood, don’t think that nearly 90 years of the Academy have been much kinder to the fairer sex. But Kathryn Bigelow did make history in 2009 when she became the first woman to win Best Director for her surprising Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.
Yet it was her stunning follow-up, the Osama Bin Laden hunt story starring Jessica Chastain, that really showed the genius of her directorial touch.
The story is pretty straightforward - Chastain is an agent following a web of informants as she closes in on what at first she does not know is the biggest prize of them all in the war of terror. Mostly set in the streets of Pakistan, she pursues this deadly network through horrific explosions, threats to herself and friends, and gut wrenching loses.
With a female but not corny touch, Bigelow and Chastain humanize the spy in a way that Greengrass and Damon only wish they could. The latter do try - they try to make the amnesiac Bourne sympathetic in his loss of past and family, in his inability to connect to anyone. But it’s a trope after all, a figment of someone’s imagination.
Bigelow and Chastain’s story is all too real, and they convey it with a conviction that is as good as any male-driven spy movie, but also with the human and spiritual gravity that only they seem to be able to understand for its complexity.
The hunt and the outcome may be rewarding (and, indeed, Bigelow’s heart pounding action sequence finale is memorable in its use of music, lighting, shadow, and action - it’s truly a masterpiece of cinema and you should stop reading now if you’ve never seen it). But even that rewarding outcome comes at a human price. The horrific price of the indelible images, the unforgettable experiences, the knowledge that you may have betrayed your moral compass or even parts of your spirit.
It’s a spy movie on paper, but it’s a human movie in reality. No wonder they say women know best. How timely, no?