‘The November Man’ Comes to Theaters August 27

Matt McAllister

Bill Granger’s most famous and now possible legacy-making literary project is his thirteen-book spy thriller series The November Man, published between 1979 and 1993. The eighth book in the series, There Are No Spies (1987), optioned six years ago by actor Pierce Brosnan to create the respective feature motion picture, moved only in fits and starts before being green-lit in 2012. As such, it seems we’ve been delivered a Reagan-era spy novel led by a Clinton-era 007 in the sunset years of the Obama administration – an uncanny combination.

As an active novelist in the 1980s, Granger’s personal history and fiction seem awfully close to our own time. When his stable newspaper reporting job suddenly dried up in the late 1970s, Granger turned to writing fiction – gritty police procedurals and a series of Cold War spy thrillers that pitted American heroes against dastardly Russians – in order to pay the bills and keep his family afloat. A bad economy, shuttering newspapers, troublesome Russians: what’s past becomes prologue.

In The November Man feature motion picture, Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan), a former-CIA official, enjoys retirement in Switzerland when he’s enticed into one final, highly-sensitive mission to protect the valuable and beautiful Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko). But Devereaux soon begins to suspect that his involvement with this mission may be ostensibly less about his primary duty, as it is about positioning him as prey to his former friend and CIA protégé David Mason (Luke Bracey). The hero’s suspicions unearth a plot that involves the highest levels of the United States government and the president-elect of Russia, one in which Devereaux is but an expendable pawn who must now free himself from the machinations of the plan, while simultaneously trying to save Fournier.

The November Man was helmed by veteran spy genre director Roger Donaldson (Cadillac Man, Dante’s Peak, The Bank Job) and scored by Academy Award-nominated composer Marco Beltrami (3:10 to Yuma, The Hurt Locker, World War Z). These credits indicate that, if nothing else, this team knows exactly how to create a heightened sense of tension and unique suspense, which are likely to lead the film’s success. The perfunctory expectations of the spy thriller are well known, so a contemporary spy thriller is dependent upon the director’s ability to betray those expectations without moving the film too far away from its template.

Donaldson and Brosnan have their work cut out for them here, as Granger’s book is approaching its third decade in circulation. Any novelties evident or utilized in Hollywood have been absorbed long ago. However, these two have gathered over 70 years of collective motion picture experience, so we will wait with baited breath to see just how well they can achieve a needed sense of novelty within an increasingly standardized genre. No easy task.

The November Man opens in Theaters August 27.