She and Henry haven’t seen each other for eight years, but he arranges to meet her at an earthy high-end wine-country restaurant for lunch. She left him - and the Agency - immediately afterward, and is now married with two kids in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. (A movie can’t reveal its culprit in the first 10 minutes.)īut could the mole really be the other person Henry has been asked to question with extreme prejudice? That would be Celia Harrison (Newton), who was carrying on a romantic affair with him back when the hijacking happened. That sounds so much like a red flag, and Pryce’s performance is so brimming with flustered mis-attempts to keep his cool, that we immediately suspect he’s too obvious a candidate. In London, he shows up at a pub to surprise Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce), a former veteran of the Vienna office who phone logs indicate made a mysterious call to Iran the night of the hijacking.
Why did this disaster happen? New evidence suggests that there was a mole in the CIA ranks, and Henry has been ordered to ferret out the betrayer. The terrorists wound up killing everyone onboard (over 100 people), including themselves. In 2012, a Turkish airliner was hijacked by jihad terrorists as it sat on the runway of the Vienna airport.
He is called in by his former boss at the Vienna office (played by Laurence Fishburne with a tone just neutral enough to be untrustworthy) to look into an old case. Pine’s Henry Pelham is a veteran CIA operative, the kind of case agent who wins the trust of his sources with his fluency in their language and his aura of empathy. Instead of simply slamming romance and terrorist politics into one movie, “All the Old Knives” weaves them together into a kind of thriller lanyard. The film is based on a novel by Olen Steinhauer, who also wrote the screenplay, and it has a novelistic flavor in the best sense. The film jumps back and forth between a couple of time periods and settings, and while in some thrillers that kind of thing can be annoying - a way of goosing inert action - in this one, the director, Janus Metz (the former documentarian who made 2017’s “Borg vs. Watching “All the Old Knives,” you never forget why Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton (warning! dated term coming) are movie stars. It’s not John le Carré, but it’s not thinly patched together pulp either. So I’m glad to report that “All the Old Knives” is a minor but engrossing genre movie: tightly wound, more or less rooted in the real world, with taut dialogue and espionage gambits that fall just this side of contrived. (Ho-hum product has always been with us but there’s more of it now.) When you see that a couple of actors as good as Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton have teamed up for a spy thriller that’s being released by Amazon Studios, and that it’s called “ All the Old Knives” (a title that sounds like it could be about anything or nothing), you wonder - a little more than you might have 30 years ago - if it’s a project that makes good on their talents or whether it’s another ho-hum slab of product. The streaming era, with its glut of viewing options and its omnipresent yet thinly spread advertising, often makes it harder for audiences to get an advance read on a movie.
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