Who watches the watchers? Who offers covert support to the unwitting secret services when they get themselves into scrapes? According to Tom Harper’s uneven but enjoyable high-tech espionage action romp, there’s a mysterious organisation known as the Charter, controlled by an all-seeing supercomputer and made up of elite former agents, which swoops in to tidy up where governments, security agencies and rogue entities have made a bit of a mess of things.
And if that all sounds a bit MI does AI, that’s presumably the point. There’s very little that’s original in this Bond-alike adventure, which has a fine time of it parachuting ace hacker Rachel Stone (Gal Gadot), MI5 veteran Parker (Jamie Dornan) and computer prodigy Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt) into various stunning locations around the world (Reykjavik takes the most punishment). The screenplay is a rudimentary thing – scaffolding to support the set pieces – that starts to creak whenever it attempts any depth of character. But the action is terrific, with a screaming, tyre-shredding extended car chase around Lisbon’s tight, cobbled alleys a breathless and exhilarating highlight.
In select cinemas and on Netflix
