High, low or middle brow categorizations hold no water in The MacMahonian. In these pages, a film is as good as it is good. Language, genre, budget, market targeting or cultural prejudices don't count. Case in point: November Man.
November Man is Roger Donaldson's 18th feature film. Starting in 1977 in his native New Zealand, Donaldson has created an underrated corpus of superior old school workaday action films with first-rate pace and, increasingly rarely in the genre, first-rate character development, worthy of, say, Don Siegel or Richard Donner in best form. From several, I'd recall The Getaway (1994) remake of eponymous 1972 Sam Peckinpah effort, featuring Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, Michael Madsen and James Woods in their heyday.
November Man tells the story of retired CIA operative Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) “persuaded” out of retirement to try to save a former colleague/love interest, who is in danger due to possessing incriminating information on an up-and-coming Russian politician´s previous murderous involvement in the Balkan and Chechen wars. To clean his tracks, said politician is having a number of CIA operatives “who have no business dying” killed. The cliffhanger action takes place mostly in Belgrade (where most principal photography was shot) and Moscow, seamlessly intertwining 3 simultaneous plotlines (CIA HQ office politics featuring mandatory “mole”, Brosnan pulling 007 meets Mike Hammer stunts punishing baddies and protecting goodies, and seedy Russian politician shenanigans) and, in characteristic Donaldson style, transcends the mostly formulaic dimensions of characters and plot by capitalizing on the teacher/pupil/father/sun relationship between Devereaux and former rookie/protégé David Mason (Luke Bracey) who now turns out has to try to kill Devereaux, c'est la vie, and on the father/daughter/say-no-more-here relationship between Devereaux and refugee activist/damsel in distress Alice Fournier/Mira Filipova (Olga Kurylenko, who, believe it or not, can act) with whom he (spoiler alert) ends up sailing (actually, travels by train) into the sunset with his 12-old daughter, in what maybe happiness ever after (although throughout Devereaux attitude toward Alice/Mira was strictly hardboiled/chaste professional).
November Man has not a dull nor (for the genre's standards) dumb moment and easily outperforms the whole Bourne series as well as many of the latest Bond movies.
MacMahonian thoughts for the day: (1) lo brow ain't no brow and (2) did they never think of Roger Donaldson for the director's chair of a 007 film?