THE TAILOR OF PANAMA

THE TAILOR OF PANAMA

Directed by John Boorman. Starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, Jamie Lee Curtis, Harold Pinter

A curiously flat black comedy-cum-thriller, The Tailor Of Panama squanders the myriad of talents involved, forming a limp and largely incoherent mess of a movie.

Egomaniacal, self-serving secret agent Andy Osnard (Brosnan) is banished to Panama after various mysterious incidents involving British diplomats’ wives (naturally enough). After the relatively smooth handover of the Canal from US control back to Panama, his skills are somewhat redundant until he meets up with Cockney ex-convict Harry Pendel (Rush).

Having fashioned a reputation for himself as a former Savile Row tailor, Harry now dresses the country’s rich and powerful, and is therefore theoretically well-placed to gather information for ‘British Intelligence’ (a contradiction in terms, surely?) The snag is that he is, in fact, privy to absolutely fuck-all, but does have huge financial debts which he doesn’t wish to trouble his heiress missus (Curtis) with.

Hence, he begins to weave an elaborate fiction, casting his mates (including a down-and-out Brendan Gleeson) as major players in a Panamanian ‘silent opposition’, so that they too can collect the Crown’s shilling. Meanwhile, Brosnan decides to manipulate the situation for his own ends, triggering a chain of events that comes to threaten Panama itself..

In theory, The Tailor Of Panama should have enormous comedic potential. A collaboration between the fantastically accomplished (if declining) John Boorman and unparalleled spy-thriller deity John le Carre, with a fairly star-studded cast, it should have at least managed to entertain. Almost tragically, it never does. Brosnan’s character is a case in point: it’s ostensibly a welcome subversion/parody of his 007 role, with our secret agent laid up in a pervy flophouse watching oriental porn and slavering ‘Yum-yum!’ in approval. But it plays as downright lurid and nasty, and in any case, the James Bond oeuvre is already so well-and-truly beyond parody that there’s little to be gained from sending it up.

Another difficulty arises from The Tailor Of Panama’s lack of distance from the genre it is supposed to be reprising (it’s hard to condemn Brosnan’s lechery when the camera spends hours gazing lovingly upon Panama’s red-light district). The script and the actors are pulling in completely different directions, and the whole affair seems uneven and unsure in the extreme, veering from moments of mirth to brutal beatings. In part, this is down to the difficulty of condensing le Carre’s novel into a two-hour time space: there’s not enough scope to explore the corruption, the drugs, the money-laundering and related issues. (And of course there’s Brosnan himself, who is more than any movie can possibly handle).

A spectacularly unengaging and unappealing exercise, and a complete waste of the talents involved.