Spy Story

Len Deighton's cold and vivid view of cynical power-mongering, his existential anti-heroes coopted forcibly into a labyrinthine and rigid power structure, translated an American idiom into a specifically British context. It is an acerbic distillation that should have fuelled a far richer strand of cinema than it has. Shonteff's film catches Deighton's nuances of power and corruption, but sequences that do for starters hardly work as a continuing ploy; and soon characters are locked in limp confrontation, exchanging increasingly cryptic chunks of information while the plot works towards total incomprehensibility.