Review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) by Mariostnick — 15 Jan 2012

Before you see this movie, you need to ask yourself if you are an avid fan of the History channel. Because this Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would be a great fit for the History channel, if the History channel was dull, boring, and uninspired. Tinker belongs as a feature movie in The Invention of Lying, which showed clips of this genre as spoofs to show how dry filmmaking would be without invention. Tinker has now soundly proven the point.

I am not one who needs to be hit over the head to "get it". I like films that drops subtle clues. But Tinker's subtlety was lost on me, and I felt I needed to be hit over the head if only to put a merciful end to the two longest hours of my life. The film's greatest weakness was time discontinuity, back and forth, over and over, using the same actors, who were no younger as they went back in time. The viewer is forced to continually be looking for the time-sense of each scene, so there was little time, or desire, to sort out the intended puzzle. If you like puzzles, you may very well like this film, but I would advise, instead, that you spend your two hours poring over the 10,000 piece puzzle on your card table.