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The Courier

This iteration of The Courier is the latest in the long line of films called The Courier. Leaving out articles or add-ons (so no The Courier from Lisbon from 1921 Germany and Courier from the USSR in 1986), we're still left with a handful of exact titles. There's an Irish film from 1988 with Gabriel Byrne, a B-movie from 2007, a Jeffrey Dean Morgan vehicle from 2012 and a film from 2019 which appears to star Gary Oldman's eye patch and Olga Kurylenko's leather-clad arse. I guess films have been pitched on less. Without seeing any of these other Courier films, it appears they're set in the crime genre, whereas this most recent one, directed by Dominic Cooke, leads us through the murky world of cold war espionage in the early 1960's.

The characters are based on real people, the leads being Greville Wynne, played by Benefit Lumberjacks....Benadryl Cumberbash....ummm Benedict Cumberbatch, and Oleg Penkovsky, played remarkably by a real Georgian, Merab Ninidze. Both these fellas are top-drawer - I've not seen Cumberbatch in better form of late and I've only seen Ninidze once before (Nowhere in Africa, which I bought on DVD in China for about 20 cents, about 20 years ago), but he's an imposing presence.

The story sees Penkovsky, a Soviet GRU colonel, making overtures to the West due to his mistrust of Khrushchev, leading the Brits to enlist a businessman, Wynne, to act as contact and titular courier of information back to London. Initial surprise, then reluctance on the part of Wynne eventually give way to montages of things going swimmingly. Events come to a head during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Penkovsky helps to defuse, though actual events may differ from what's presented. Here's where the tension starts to build nicely and the ensuing scenes are pretty well handled by the cast, with Jessie Buckley, as Wynne's wife, Sheila, adding some wrinkles of mistrust from back in Blighty. If you're not too familiar with the real story, the film may give you moments of pause, suffice to say, Cumberbatch is put through it - he's not gone full Bale in The Machinist, but it's still a shock.

The Courier doesn't waste time, it balances the themes of trust and loyalty with the necessity of ripping out a solid yarn, and it boasts some engaging performances. A functional, tense spy story, that may just tickle the facts a little, and there's nowt wrong with that.

See also:

A similar dynamic in the inferior film Bridge of Spies (2015), directed by Steven Spielberg, and Errol Morris's The Fog of War (2003) is an excellent documentary about key player in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert McNamara.

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