All the Old Knives

 "It's the things that we don't know that get to me."

All the Old Knives is a terrible title that I couldn't make any sense of. On a literal level the only knives that appear are your basic cutlery at a restaurant and they are relatively new. On a figurative level, it must mean something to someone but I'm lost. 

The film has also been billed as a 'thriller' which doesn't feel quite right, though I'm not entirely sure what genre I would classify under instead. Most of the film is centred around two people having dinner which whilst engaging isn't really thrilling. I have to say that I quite liked the dialogue-driven style and it really allows the actors to shine.

We see brief scenes at the start of the CIA Office in Vienna reeling when they failed to save a hi-jacked plane and everyone onboard died.  Some eight years later agent Harry Pelham (Chris Pine) is told that there was a mole in the CIA feeding information to the terrorists and it's his job to find them. Number one suspect is Celia (Thandiwe Newton), Pelham's lover at the time of the incident. They meet for dinner and go over the events of the time. 

The element that works well here is the chemistry between Pine and Newton- incidentally it's lovely to see a Hollywood movie where the female lead is actually slightly older than the male lead. In the flashback scenes it's utterly convincing they are in love and the sense of reunion in the present day is wonderful but gradually sours as the two end up revealing the secrets they've been keeping. The whole film relies on this convincing and evolving relationship and it's achieved excellently with Pine giving one of his best performances and Newton utterly fantastic- she really ought to be a bigger star than she is.

I didn't think the plot was especially engaging with the two characters recalling events from the time of the terrorist attack that they actually both know all the facts of, making the whole conversation somewhat redundant. I did like though that they really showed how Celia had been affected by the incident, how it was still traumatising even though she wasn't actually there. The ending is pretty satisfying and though the mole reveal was fairly obvious it was well done and there's smaller twist that I didn't see coming which really brings out the emotion in the climax. 

A great pair of lead performances take on a script which has some good moments, even if it's not especially memorable overall. If nothing else, it's a relatively lightweight, watchable spy film.