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All the Old Knives movie poster
All the Old Knives moves with the brisk genre efficiency expected of an espionage thriller and delivers many of the anticipated pleasures. Directed by Denmark’s Janus Metz from the novel by American thriller author Olen Steinhauer, Old Knives stars a pair of familiar faces in Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton. He plays a CIA agent given a hard case to crack. She plays a retired CIA agent at the heart of that case. Oh, and they were lovers eight years earlier when that case blew up.
Like many movies of its kind, All the Old Knives revels in time jumping (EIGHT YEARS LATER turns into TWO WEEKS EARLIER), albeit here the formula makes a certain sense amidst the crosscutting of recollections. Yes, there is also that de rigeur country-continent hopping. The case that sets the story in motion is a hijacked plane at the Vienna airport ending in the death of everyone onboard. The bustling CIA station inside the U.S. Embassy in Vienna and the old city’s dark alleys are settings; as is rainy London where one of the CIA agents involved, avuncular Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce), has retired; and sunny Carmel on the Sea in California wine country, where Celia Harrison (Newton) lives in midcentury modern splendor with her husband and children.
Henry Pelham (Pine) is the agent whose travels link the settings together. He has been ordered by the CIA’s Vienna station chief (the implacable Laurence Fishburne) to reopen the investigation into the hijacking debacle. The agency believes there was a mole inside the station working with the terrorists. “We can’t afford the embarrassment of a prosecution,” the chief says, ruling out the justice system. Henry will have to do “what is necessary” to close the case.
For the most part, director Metz makes good use of flashbacks. When Henry glimpses the back of Celia’s neck when the meet at a posh wine bar, an erotic pop-up is triggered—a brief memory of a passionate moment from years earlier. By movie’s end, however, the flashbacks are dragged out and seem designed to sweeten the story’s grim implications with a dash of schmaltz. Still, much of the film works in swift, unsentimental strokes. In one scene, the camera pans around the Vienna station, introducing a bevy of clandestine characters, all of them potential suspects.
All the Old Knives’ themes are descended from John le Carré’s moral malaise in the shadowlands of espionage. There are references to actual incidents in post 9/11 Russia (part of Putin’s power grab) and sideways glances at the sometimes-duplicitous role of U.S. foreign policy and the Third World conditions that give rise to terrorism. But this is also a love story. No one can be trusted in a world of secrets and lies, including those closest to each other.
All the Old Knives is streaming on Amazon Prime.
