Kurt Loder Reviews The November Man and Life of Crime

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Relativity Media

One of the subsidiary pleasures of an old-school spy movie is vicarious globe-trotting. We don't want to watch James Bond or Jason Bourne moping around in some grim Le Carré-style safe house; we want to see them prowling the souks of Istanbul and leaping across the rooftops of teeming Tangier. We want Paris, London, Berlin. Unfortunately, writes Kurt Loder, The November Man, a new film shot in the unglamorous but budget-friendly outlands of Serbia and Montenegro, offers virtually none of this traditional spy-flick travel porn. Which would be okay; it's not crucial. However, the movie is also deficient in more important ways that might otherwise compensate for the lack of cool stuff to look at.