Spooks: The Greater Good

The TV show Spooks burst on to our screens in 2002, a constant and sometimes extremely brutal reminder that the world is no longer safe, but the secret service are always on hand to take the edge of the terrorist threat with a mixture of high-tech snooping and low tech shooting. The real Secret Service don’t normally kick the doors down or your face in, but Spooks was never an attempt to do anything more than entertain and maybe stop you sleeping a little bit.

And now it’s been made into a film. Spooks: The Greater Good might be a two part episode pushed together. It’s got nothing that the series lacked except maybe a few instances of harsh language that would never be acceptable, even after the watershed. It begins with an operation to extradite a high-profile terrorist, but the operation is jeopardised and Qasim (Elys Gabel) gets away because Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) doesn’t want to risk civilian casualties. A couple of young agents go after the fleeing Qasim: one of them is gunned down, but the other, the lovely June (the lovely Tuppence Middleton) is clearly marked out as the film’s perky, pretty agent. Harry suspects that he’s been set up, and the Service is at risk—not just from terrorists, but from takeover of the entire surveillance operation to the Americans! In order to try and sort the whole thing out, Harry gets hold of an agent he’s previously decommissioned—and every lady is delighted when it turns out to be Kit Harington.

When Spooks isn’t running and shooting there’s a lot of back-room talking. The head of the entire service, Mace (Tim McInnerny) doesn’t like Harry, thinks he’s a Cold War relic: a nutter who has gone rogue. Warner (David Harewood) is the service’s political cover and Geraldine (Jennifer Ehle) is the steely high-profile spy from way back.

There is the usual running around, house-breaking and talking on phones. There’s a lot of “You better not be playing me” but of course people get played and there’s also a cameo from the show’s old-timer techy who does some computer stuff in a South London cybercafe and almost brings the entire MI5 computer system crashing down. 

It seems to be the usual silly post-9/11 nonsense, and Spooks is never going for the glamour of Bond or the sombre skulduggery of Le Carré. It’s always been something in between and in this case the title really does say it all. The film is about sacrifice, and doing the bad thing as a barely palatable alternative to a large scale atrocity. It’s almost sad that a bombed theatre with numerous casualties is almost a sideshow, but the point is nicely made in the film’s high-action finale and the low-key actual finale.

Peter Firth is solid as the man whose lifelong career in an unforgiving service has taken its toll. Kit Harington looks impossibly young, and to be fair so does Tuppence Middleton. The most interesting performance comes from Jennifer Ehle, who steps very nicely into that inconspicuous senior spook mould. 

Most people will want to catch this when it turns up on television. It’s an engaging film, but not really any different to the TV show. I would love to see more Spooks films but there’s probably little chance of that happening.