The Courier stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Greville Wynne, a manufacturing salesman in 1960s Britain who is recruited by the British and American governments to help a GRU colonel (Merib Nidize) smuggle out Soviet secrets to the West at the height of the Cold War when Russia and America were on the brink of Nuclear Conflict but this is a dangerous game both men play and neither will find it easy to get out of it alive.
The Courier has a very strong first two thirds going for it, the performances particularly by Cumberbatch are very solid for the most part and the film has some great production design for 1960s Soviet Russia and there is a real sense of mood and tension in terms of how these 2 men are going to get these top state secrets out of the country without getting caught or killed which is always used as a real threat to both of them and their families as is the then very real threat of Nuclear War between the East and the West at that point in time.
But when the film goes into its third act it felt like a lot of that tension and mood dissipated and the film began to slow down to a point where it felt kind of predictable and also I began to feel that this movie as well made and performed as it is might not land as much given how far away we are as a society from that threat of Nuclear Holocaust and the tensions between Russia and America as they existed back then and while it is a very good thing for the world that things are better between the 2 powers this story took place nearly 60 years ago and probably won’t work for a younger audience.
And so that was the Courier and its got a great first two thirds but a third act that sees the film fizzle out a little in the end, 2 out of 5.
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