Spooks: The Greater Good (2015)

Spooks: The Greater Good arrives in 2015 as an extension of a television series that had already run ten seasons, which means the film carries the weary obligation of servicing an existing congregation while pretending to welcome newcomers. Bharat Nalluri directs with the competence of a man who has done this before, and the plot moves through Berlin, Moscow, and a Thames bridge with the efficiency of a commuter train. The result is a spy thriller that knows its business and has no interest in announcing anything larger than itself.

The cultural inventory here is modest and largely incidental. Several non-white actors occupy operational and intelligence roles, and the film neither celebrates nor examines this arrangement. It simply casts them. Women likewise hold positions of authority, from Jennifer Ehle's deputy director general to Eleanor Matsuura's field operative, and the film grants them competence without ever constructing an argument about it. This is diversity as set dressing, which is to say it exists and does not insist on itself. Nobody in the screenplay pauses to explain what any of it means, and for that small mercy we can be grateful.

The one moment of rhetorical ambition arrives near the end, when Harry Pearce explains that the deaths of a handful of agents were preferable to the deaths of hundreds of civilians. It is a moral arithmetic speech, and it belongs to the thriller tradition of justifying the grim cost of the job. The film does not push further. It has no thesis about capital, no environmental conscience, no interest in the body or the mind's variations. Instead it offers a poisoned lunch, a conspiracy, and the quiet satisfaction of a professional doing necessary work. We have seen this vintage before. It is drinkable.