A Most Wanted Man

They don’t do it like 007 any more. Spies, that is. In his captivating adaptation of John le Carré’s 2008 novel, director Anton Corbijn replaces the martinis with cheap Scotch, the Aston Martin with a decaying Mercedes, and Bond with Günther Bachmann (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shambolic alcoholic, who huffs and puffs and chain smokes his way around the grim, grey streets of Hamburg.

This is post-9/11 Hamburg, a city with uneasy memories of Mohamed Atta, who lived here undisturbed while he plotted the September 11 attacks. Bachmann, who works in the shadows and somewhere just outside the law, is here to ensure that such a thing never happens again.

Which means that when a young man named Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) appears on CCTV at a train station, Bachmann is spurred into putting down his whisky glass – at least for a little while. For the Chechen, Karpov, is classified by Interpol as an escaped jihadist – and has links to a large sum of money in a very murky bank account.

But is Karpov really planning an atrocity? Or is he an innocent asylum seeker? The plot, which seamlessly fills the film’s 121-minute running time, keeps us guessing and hoping and fretting to the very last. Make sure you wear antiperspirant.

The cast is outstanding. Philip Seymour Hoffman (who sadly died from an overdose earlier this year) conveys his character’s cynical genius with superlative aplomb. You can smell Bachmann’s halitosis and hear the rasp of his breath. He could pick up an award for the way he extinguishes his cigarettes. This isn’t your usual trampled cliché of a good spook turned sour. It is a creation all Hoffman’s own. Ironically, just months before his death, it is Hoffman at his zenith.

But he is not alone. Dobrygin beautifully captures the ambiguity and bitterness of is-he-isn’t-he Issa; Willem Dafoe is reptilian as ever as shady banker Thomas Brue, while Rachel McAdams is breezily convincing as Annabel Richter, the earnest, idealistic lawyer who believes that she is aiding the dispossessed but may just be, in the words of Bachmann, playing social worker to terrorists. Hamburg, a city rarely seen on a postcard, puts in a fine turn as the grimy backdrop, too.

A few lazy clichés prevail – cue the clean-cut, blunt-edged American to whom nuance is anathema – but this is a thriller in the true sense of the word. It is expertly shot, stunningly cast and slickly written. With more meagre means, it even outguns the 2011 big-screen adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – and that had Colin Firth and Gary Oldman starring in it.

Go and see it. Just remember that this is also, nearly, the real world – things rarely turn out how you expect.