All the Old Knives

The film then uses parallel timelines, cutting between the current conversation between Henry and Celia and extended flashbacks showing what they were doing ...

As espionage narratives go, “All the Old Knives,” which is based on the novel by Olen Steinhauer (who also wrote the screenplay), is closer to the more cerebral and realistic creations of John le Carré than the comic book fantasies of James Bond (underscored perhaps a bit too bluntly at one point where Henry attempts to order a vodka martini and is rebuffed). The early set-up scenes are reasonably intriguing but at a certain point, things just stop working. It soon becomes clear at least one of them knows more about what happened than they are letting on, and that the sumptuous feast they have been consuming will most likely prove to be the last meal for at least one of them. Henry is charged with interviewing the surviving members of the group—one mysteriously committed suicide a couple of months after the incident—to see if he can ferret out which one is guilty.

Still, this lifeless espionage mystery has one or two things going for it.

All the Old Knives rustily crunches through its story of duplicitous spies covering up a terrorist attack. All the Old Knives is not related to Knives Out, but it does feature a mystery. Based on a spy novel inspired by real events, All the Old Knives hints at more interesting depths to the tragedy that took place. the duplicity…" "The lies… But then the movie invests in one of the most annoying plot mechanics of prestige TV shows: flashbacks.

The year is 2011, and CIA agents Henry (Chris Pine) and Celia (Thandiwe Newton) are colleagues and lovers. But one fateful day, a terrible (fictional) terrorist ...

Plot twist: Celia tells Henry she knows he was the one who made the call on Bill’s phone, and that he is the mole who leaked the information about Ahmed to the terrorists. In the final scene, we see Vick get a call letting him know that Henry is dead, while Celia walks down the street, thinking about her past relationship with Henry. Then she goes home to her husband and child and goes back to her life. Remember that weird meeting Celia had with the Muslim Women’s Foundation? It turns out that while Celia was at that meeting, Henry was at a meeting of his own, with Ilyas Shishani, the man behind the attack. Then Henry gets a call from the assassin he hired, asking whether or not he should kill Celia. Henry is too far gone to answer, so in the end, the assassin does not kill Celia—but we’re left wondering what he would have said. Celia is devastated that Henry would try to pin this on her, and ruin her life when he knows she is innocent. At the same time, Henry seems to be ready to pin the leak on his aging colleague Bill Compton. After all, it was Bill’s phone that had a call to Tehran on the same day as the attack, and Bill does act pretty suspicious when Henry is interviewing him. In the flashbacks, we learn that on the day of the attack, Celia discovered the suspicious call to Tehran made from Bill’s phone on the call log. Read on for the All the Old Knives plot summary and the All the Old Knives ending, explained. At the end of this day horrible day, Henry and Celia share a desperate, passionate night together. In the present day, Celia tells Henry she doesn’t believe the man had information, and just wanted money—but Henry’s reaction suggests he knows something she doesn’t. Vick, the boss, stresses that no one else can know about Ahmed. Later, when Ahmed sends a new message to the CIA telling the agency to comply with all of the terrorists’ demands—in a completely different tone of voice—they suspect that the message is not really from him. Based on the novel of the same name by Olen Steinhauer—who also adapted the screenplay—All the Old Knives is a quiet spy thriller directed by Danish filmmaker Janus Metz Pedersen. Most of the film is spent over the course of a dinner between Pine and Newton’s characters, as the two recall a traumatic day in their past lives as CIA agents and lovers.

Not necessarily the best of this genre, but All the Old Knives is a solid character drama benefiting from strong performances by a top-drawer cast.

As to that plot (with screenplay by Steinhauer himself), I’m not entirely sure how well it all holds together after a few hours to actually take stock of it, but certainly in the moment, there are enough twists and turns to justify the investment. In that sense, this is a role that feels uniquely suited to Pine, benefiting greatly from the almost-decade of fermenting since his Jack Ryan escapade. And as directed by Janus Metz Pedersen (whose 2017 film Borg/McEnroe I enjoyed quite a bit), All the Old Knives eschews the bombast and spectacle of Bond and Ryan in favor of a more intimate, quiet movie that lives largely in close-ups as various characters stare each other down across tables at restaurants and diners. It gets into the grittiness of spycraft – the emotional and psychological toll involved in moving living, breathing people hither and thither across an imaginary chessboard. But in the streaming age, such movies land on Amazon Prime, etc., garnering buzz for a week or two before getting subsumed by the next new thing and the exigencies of the algorithm. Just over eight years ago, Chris Pine starred in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, yet another in Paramount’s long line of attempts to reboot Tom Clancy’s everyman superspy.