The Courier: Neon NZ Film Review

It's clear what The Courier is trying to do.

That's deliver a slice of a true-life spy story you'd never heard of before.

It's the take of unassuming businessman Greville Wynne (Cumberbatch, in clipped English and dressed up tones), who, through a friendship with someone he believes to be a business colleague but is in fact a spy, gets co-opted into heading to Russia in the 1960s. Befuddled as to why he's chosen, he protests he'll be caught. But as he's told repeatedly "You really are the last man we'd send."

His mission - to deliver messages to and from Oleg Penkovsky (Ninidze, easily the film's true star) at the height of nuclear tensions between the east and the west.

However, Penkovsky could be the key to ending the Cuban Missile Crisis - as the net begins to tighten around both the Russian and the seemingly clueless Brit.

The Courier is solid, but unspectacular fare, that does what you'd expect and little more.

Draped in dour browns of England, and washed out greys in Russia, the film's eye for period detail captures the monotone worlds both live in - but unfortunately, some of that monotone seeps out of the screen and washes over the audience.

While it's decently shot, The Courier feels depressingly formulaic as it aims for prestige picture status, but ends up hitting more like TV movie writ large.

All eyes will obviously be on Cumberbatch, but the film's true star is the relatively anonymous Ninidze as Penkosvky, a man whose gait and posture conveys more in seconds than screeds of all-too-familiar dialogue can deliver.

With a wearied look and a sense of purpose behind his eyes, it's clear Ninidze's Penkosvky is the real raison d'etre for this spy thriller and he's all the more captivating for it. That's not to dismiss Cumberbatch, who's as solid as usual, but he's acted off the screen here by a man doing less.

Where The Courier misses the mark is in the formulation of a story that seems stereotyped in some ways and surplus in others.

Brosnahan's CIA agent who helps co-opt Wynne is a once over lightly character, a woman in a man's world figure brought in for little more. Though her "what would you do when the 4 minute warning sounds" speech to Wynne over a sense of duty sees her bring a fire that the script has largely robbed her of throughout.

This tale of espionage doesn't have the bells and whistles of others of its genre, and it's to be commended for doing so; but in its execution and journey to the big screen, it's lost a little of the sparkle you'd expect, and smothered the based-on-true-events proceedings with a sheen that leaves its historical counterparts slightly bereft of the acclaim they would deserve.