This movie comes to me as vindication for John le Carré after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a movie I still don’t understand what it was about and The Tailor of Panama that although I consider it was a good book, being a Panamanian myself, I know there are huge blanks that could have been included to make it even better.
To this day though, his better piece is The Constant Gardener.
IMDB reports that “John le Carré’s source novel, A Most Wanted Man, is based on the real life of Murat Kurnaz, a Muslim Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001 and with the German government’s awareness incarcerated by extraordinary rendition (aka irregular rendition) at US military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba for five years.”
Something I really enjoyed in this movie was the absence of bullets. This is a suspense movie about espionage. Spies are portrayed as mundane people without a life of their own. Not a James Bond’s.
The cast is great and included the late Philip Seymour Hoffman who delivers an eerie and subtle performance as a human being with such kind of job.
“To Make the World a Safer Place” requires taking the higher ground. Nonetheless, our peace makers are more interested in their own spotlight than in actually working as one to attain such goal. Such is the nature of humanity!