MI-5: The Greater Good (2015)

Directed by Bharat Nalluri. Starring Kit Harrington, Peter Firth, Lara Pulver, Tim McInnerny, Jennifer Ehle, Elyes Gabel, Hugh Simon, Tuppence Middleton, Elliot Levey, Eleanor Matsuura, David Harewood. [R]

Generic and desultory spy thriller of the British counter-intelligence agency better known as MI-5, with the head of the counter-terrorism branch (Firth) faking his own death in an effort to uncover a mole in their midst. Harrington plays a young operative who has a personal history with Firth, and eventually gets swept up in the action. About halfway between Ian Fleming and John le Carré (with the restless camera of the Jason Bourne movies), these murky political waters feel about as exciting as day-old bath water—the direction, photography, editing, and so on are all handled professionally but without a whiff of inspiration. Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent’s script contains the requisite twists (at least one of them genuinely surprising), but with so little invested interest in the story or consequences, they’re about as mind-blowing as pulling a coin out of someone’s ear with sleight-of-hand. Based on a long-running British television series, “Spooks” (this film’s alternate title is Spooks: The Greater Good).

44/100