Survivor

A should-know-better cast trudge through the motions in this spectacularly unspectacular London-set espionage ‘thriller’. Milla Jovovich plays Kate Abbott, a miscellaneous bureaucratic hotshot (it’s never entirely clear what her expertise is) who joins the American embassy in Grosvenor Square to oversee visa applications and root out possible terrorists. She’s a loose cannon, a wild card who doesn’t take shit from nobody (she even rides a motorbike!), so it’s not long before she attracts attention from the local gang of international thugs, who set mysterious assassin Nash, aka the Watchmaker, aka a seriously bored-looking Pierce Brosnan, on her trail.

We expect to see Jovovich and Brosnan in this kind of low-rent sub-Bourne nonsense, but their supporting cast have no excuse. Angela Bassett scowls and barks as the American ambassador, Robert Forster growls and grizzles as a shifty embassy operative, James D’Arcy drives around being unbearably posh as a Met terrorism expert, and only Frances De La Tour seems to be enjoying herself at all, hamming up her American accent as Jovovich’s wheelchair-bound confidante.

There’s very little to recommend in ‘Survivor’: the first half gets completely bogged down in the minutiae of embassy admin, before switching to a series of flat, uninspiring chase sequences that culminate in a forgettable showdown on a rooftop overlooking New York’s Times Square. Brosnan completists might enjoy an hilarious five-second shot of the 62-year-old star sliding Jackie Chan-style down an electrical cable, but that really is as good as it gets, and it doesn’t get that good again.