The Ipcress File

I'd been waiting to be able to watch this without buying each streaming episode, one at a time (what kind of stupid payment model is that?), and let me say that I'm glad I did.... I had high hopes for this. I really liked James Watkins' 'Eden Lake' (his 'Descent' sequel less so), Joe Cole was really good in 'Green Room,' I've liked Lucy Boynton in some things (mostly 'Sing Street'), and Tom Hollander is always good. I read a lot of Len Deighton books when I was a kid (my dad was a fan) and, though this is wasn't my favorite, I remembered liking it and, given the script was written by John Hodge ('Trainspotting' and a bunch of the other Danny Boyle films), I settled in for a good, old time. To get this out of the way up top, as it were, Hollander is, indeed, good and Hodge's script handles the book pretty well. As for the rest of it, I'm not really sure what was going through people's minds here....I'm sorry but Cole cannot carry this, it's like he's feeling constrained by having to try and replicate Michael Caine's performance from the 1965 adaptation, and not actually throwing himself into the part (imagine if, say, the Taron Egerton of 'Kingsmen' had done this). Meanwhile, Boynton looks great in the clothing, but isn't really, you know, acting around them (maybe the fabrics are too stiff?) and gives a preposterous stilted performance as a result. And even still, both of those might have been ok to overlook as a view, but for some reason Watkins has filmed really the entire film with Dutch angles (most of the time, multiple ones in the same scene) and, rather than 'increasing the unease factor' (or whatever the technical reason for using them is), just makes it look like it was shot in an ocean-going rowboat and deadens the tension because it pulls the viewer so far out of the story. By about the 3rd episode (of six), I was ready to bail but, since I didn't, I got to watch the (and, if you've literally no idea what this story is about, this is going to be a spoiler, so...) several 'brainwashing' sequences which looked to have been cribbed from 1962 film of 'The Manchurian Candidate.' The problem with this is that I think Deighton's book was deliberately trying to redress the dippier aspects of this, er, 'technique' from Richard Condon's 'Manchurian' novel from 1959, only to have this story dragged back into woo-woo 'mind control.' Missed opportunity. (maybe have some have some motion sickness pills on if you watch)