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.
Survivor

Time Out says
Pierce Brosnan embarks on the world's most tedious killing spree in this forgettable, half-hearted espionage drama
Release Details
- Release date:Friday 5 June 2015
- Duration:96 mins
Cast and crew
- Director:James McTeigue
- Screenwriter:Philip Shelby
- Cast:
- Milla Jovovich
- James D'Arcy
- Pierce Brosnan
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