Review 429: The Night Manager

The Night Manager is an suspenseful, engrossing & gripping Espionage miniseries and a simply magnificent updating of the original John le Carre spy thriller.

Based on Espionage novel The Night Manager by John le Carre, Luxury hotel night manager and former British soldier, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is recruited by intelligence officer Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman) and is tasked to navigate Whitehall and Washington D.C. where there is an alliance between the intelligence community and the secret arms trade. He must infiltrate the inner circle of arms dealer Richard "Dicky" Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie), Roper's trophy girlfriend Jed Marshall (Elizabeth Debicki) and associate Lance "Cokry" Corkoran (Tom Hollander).

The plot is intelligent, rousing, suspenseful and filled to the brim with nail biting tension.
Updating John le Carre's stories for a post-9/11 audience is no easy task and the team behind this miniseries pull it off superbly. As the miniseries goes, the tension just keeps building. The plot continuously unfolds without breaks like a good thriller should. It's very much rooted in 21st Century/Post 9/11 politics.

Apart from the suspenseful, slowly unfolding storytelling and gripping pacing, the real meat of The Night Manager is its political subtext which were updating le Carre's original cold war novel really and truly shines. It doesn't just show us as an audience the up close and grittiness of War with Roper, it's also explores bachkchanneling of international intelligence agencies with Angela Burr's investigations slowly revealing a conspiracy of corruption between the C.I.A, M.I.6 and Roper as the Miniseries goes on. The Miniseries also explores, to tremendous effect, the inner workings of the secret arms trade, effectively showcasing how arms dealers like Roper get hold of destructive weapons in the first place.

Director Susanne Bier is consistently suspenseful and stylish throughout the progression of the  miniseries, the cinematography is gorgeous, the locations (Egypt, Switzerland, Spain) are simply beautiful, the score by Victor Reyes is magnificent, the production design is exquisite, beautifully brining to life the high class society that the characters inhabit, the costumes are similarly lavish,

Tom Hiddleston & Hugh Laurie are fantastic in this miniseries.

What's intriguing about the character of Jonathan Pine is how enigmatic he is and how we don't really get to know much about him. We assume he's suffering from PTSD following two tours of duty in Iraq and he's now trying to settle down and live a quiet life but nothing concrete.

As "Dicky" Roper, Hugh Laurie is appropriately menacing & scary as well as immensely charming and charismatic  Some who sees, as he eloquently says it, "War is spectators sport"

Elizabeth Debicki is earnest and deeply effective as Jed, Roper's girlfriend, as the miniseries goes on, we get to uncover the prilamitiers