A veteran secret agent, John Preston (Michael Caine) becomes alarmed when a Soviet agent is intercepted carrying material for a nuclear bomb.
That material was intended for Major Valeri Alekseyevich Petrofsky (Pierce Brosnan), a deep cover agent who has been tasked with detonating a nuclear device near a US military base. The intention is to make it look like an accident so that the US will have to pull out of the UK.
Preston is in a race against time to find the bomb and stop it before Petrofsky sets it off.
I have been curious about this movie for years - Pierce Brosnan as an evil secret agent? Michael Caine? Based on a book by Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal)? Sign me up!
This movie has a great eighties British pedigree - it was written by Forsyth and directed by John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday). The photography is by Phil Meheux, who lensed Good Friday and a couple of great Bond movies.
The movie operates as an ensemble piece, but the key players are Caine and Brosnan.
Caine plays a vetern secret agent who is frustrated by his boss’s lack of imagination and support. He plays Preston with a sardonic edge - he is Harry Palmer with more years and a young son (he is widower). Caine is always good value and he makes his side of the movie far more involving than it probably read on the page.
The real surprise for me was Pierce Brosnan. It has been a while since I watched a Brosnan movie - I cooled on his Bond era and I found his acting choices florid (mouth noises, pain face yadyadayada).
Thankfully I really liked him in this.
Brosnan is a super-cold fish - he is using all the elements which would make him great as Bond (the charm, the easy smile, the sex appeal), but there is nothing behind it. He is Death in a beautiful mask.
His performance felt like a dry run for his first go as Bond in GoldenEye. There is a physicality and tension to both these performances that draws your attention. The key difference is that Brosnan dials back on the humour and the warmth. In Fourth Protocol, he feels like he is always holding his emotions back. That restraint is so good because the filmmakers offer key moments where the character’s mask almost slips.
These brief moments of humanity only make him more disturbing - this is a man who is willing himself into becoming a killing machine. He was not born this way - he has made himself this way through sheer force of will.
Brosnan always feels like he is about to explode, and it is one of the film’s main strengths.
As far as the filmmaking goes, the film is pretty downbeat. I enjoyed the cool blues of the cinematography and the downbeat aesthetic of mid-eighties England. This movie feels closer to the muted tones and colour palette of a seventies thriller than the flashier aesthetic of the eighties.
I also enjoyed how quiet the movie is, and how much time it devotes to the tradecraft of espionage, from a staged burglary through an elaborate tail on a suspected turncoat. The filmmakers also dedicate a lot of time to Petrofsky’s mission, as he gathers the elements of the bomb.
For the first half, the movie works as a character-based thriller, with a welcome focus on process- in the second half, these scenes start to feel like padding and the suspense starts to dissipate.
I was not sure about why this movie does not work until I rewatched another Forsyth adaptation, Day of the Jackal. At its best this movie feels like a sloppy remake of the same premise.
That movie is fetishistic about process to a degree that feels far more built for suspense than this movie. Part of the reason may be that Jackal is based around shooting a single person with a gun. I have never used a gun but I can understand the stakes as the Jackal assembles his equipment. A nuclear bomb is a more complicated proposition.
The big problem I have with the movie is pacing - the movie starts to lose itself about midway through, just when it really needs to pick up.
I think the underlying issue may be that there are not as many moving parts - Jackal is a chase movie whereas this movie is more staggered.
Day of the Jackal is solely about its premise, whereas The Fourth Protocol takes more set up. The third act is also flat - which for this kind of tick-clock thriller is bad:
The final confrontation between Caine and Brosnan is bizarre - the editing in this sequence is languorous, and the combatants are never shown in the same shot - it almost feels like they shot on seperate days.
The movie is entertaining, but it never racks up the suspense in the way it should.
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