Treason

As a time-passing entertainment, 'Treason' is fine--you can have it on while you cook or play phone games without missing much (partly because just about every plot point is explained multiple times) and have a nice time watching spies do spy-type stuff (at least as far as movies/tv shows are concerned), including poisonings, having shootouts and fistfights, using complex tracking software, etc, with a somewhat awkwardly shoe-horned family drama tacked on for 'relatability' or something. On that scale, I'd say it's probably a 3.5 star film (well, limited series) but no more. As a capital 'S' Spy film, however, it's really not very good. First, it's clearly of the post-'Alias' school where every surface is too glossy, every edge is too shiny, and every action is too slick. It's a very, very 'clean' world that these people inhabit--even the loose bricks on the building site scene towards the end look Art Directed to death. Second, it fails to understand that, in almost every successful spy narrative, it is the process, rather than the conclusion, that is makes the experience engaging; you have to know the why before you can care, to any degree, about these people. This film predicates itself on an (absurdly) convoluted backstory, involving manipulating a person, unknowingly, into the top position of a spy agency, but it is really only interested in the showing the aftereffects of the success of the mission. The effect is the same as if there'd been a title card at the beginning reading '10 years ago, half the Sneetches got stars and the other half didn't, and now one of them, Charlie Q. Sneetch, is head of MI5. What will happen, let's watch.' Who is going to care if they've no stake in story? Third, the spy sub-genre that includes 'family drama' is very tricky and, if it's not le Carre's 'A Perfect Spy,' it's really not got much of a chance of succeeding (though, to be fair, the early seasons of 'Homeland' did come close). To work, this kind of story needs to make the non-spy characters (the wives, kids, husbands, neighbors, bowling lane managers, whomever) believable in their 'own' worlds, not just lazily showing them unable to cope with the spy world, otherwise they are nothing more than cardboard fodder that you don't care about either. I didn't find the spies or the non-spies in 'Treason' to be interesting enough to care much about. On this scale, it's probably a half star film. Combining the two scores, how about we say 2 stars and agree to not talk about it again?