Directed by Simon Langton | Written by Julian Bond, from the novel by John Hale | 100 min | ▲▲1/2 | on Amazon Prime
I was a bit disappointed by The Holcroft Covenant, which I watched a few weeks back, but it reminded me Michael Caine enjoys espionage thrillers, as do I. Maybe the best he was in from that era was The Fourth Protocol. When I noted another of these pictures was available on Prime, I made a point of watching it.
The Whistle Blower isn’t quite in the Protocol‘s league, though it easily clears the Covenant‘s problems. Maybe the worst you can say about it is its plot is just a little too convoluted, but that’s part of the sailing with spy thrillers — by the end it all comes clear.
Here Caine plays Frank Jones, a grim former Navy man turned business owner and father to mild-mannered Bob Jones (Nigel Havers), who works as a translator at GCHQ, part of the British secret service. Bob listens to Russian communications. Following the revelation of a double-agent in their midst, he feels like the agents on this side of the Iron Curtain are no better than the KGB, and expresses as much to his father.
His bosses (including stalwart spy movie Brits James Fox and Gordon Jackson) surveil him and his relationship with a young mother (Felicity Dean). Around the midpoint Bob dies in suspicious circumstances, and crusty Frank starts to think maybe Bob was right about his spymasters. He meets a lefty reporter, Pickett (Kenneth Colley, who was Admiral Piett in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back) and starts to piece together a conspiracy to murder.
The first challenge here for audiences is accepting Nigel Havers as Caine’s son. The actors are 19 years apart in age, so technically plausible, but don’t resemble each other in the slightest, though the film does spend some time establishing their relationship.
If you can clear that hurdle, the picture takes its time getting where its going — much of the violence is implied or takes place off-screen, which would be fine if the director could sustain tension and a sense that Frank’s life was in jeopardy. The dark complicity of the British intelligence service — protecting double-agents so it doesn’t make the organization look bad — is suggested pretty early on, so it’s really just a matter of when Frank will piece it together. A final scene where he faces a genuinely sleazy John Gielgud is unfortunately more laughable than a satisfying conclusion to a thriller, though it does suggest the undercurrent of class and privilege as a critical aspect to the story.
The Whistle Blower offers a few incidental pleasures through its running time. There’s a nice Mission: Impossible styled twist to get one of the traitors to reveal his contact in the English upper-crust. Caine’s misty-eyed performance is up to his usual standards, and he does rage well even if you wish he’d take vengeance into his own hands a little more often — he gets to throttle a couple of guys who don’t see him coming.
Director Langton directed classic 1980s Le Carré series Smiley’s People as well as the 1995 Pride and Prejudice for the BBC, so his TV chops are pretty evident, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing — he’s good with his actors. Caine’s very cool Rover SD1 2600 Vanden Plas gets almost as much screen time as he does, a draw for those who appreciate a certain vintage of British automobile.
Overall, this is deeply cynical stuff — the suggestion of British spies not only being incompetent, but covering that up with murder so as not to make waves, that would require dozens of people at multiple levels to be too scared or too corrupt to not blow a whistle. But the Cold War paranoia pervades — it’s not as calculated and dehumanizing as le Carré, but it certainly aspires to to that subzero temperature.
