Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, in the 1979 Alec Guinness BBC miniseries, translated to film as perfectly as anything I’ve ever seen. Compared to that masterpiece, this remake is a dumbed-down comic book. I’m not just being outrageous for effect here, I mean this literally: this new version is laid out just like a comic book. Each scene is consciously framed and stylized to emphasize certain simplistic images, the characters are somehow filmed to look a bit like comic book drawings, and the amount of dialog in each scene is kept minimal, often just a few lines. This approach may be fine for actual comic books, which you can page through with alacrity, but in the context of a movie it is exceptionally boring, especially since the images they pick to emphasize are so uninspiring. For example, they keep returning to an image of a bunch of files slowly riding upward in a mini glass elevator, floor after floor after floor; you don’t even know what’s in the files!

The story lumbers forward driven by unsophisticated, obvious plot devices and motives, all of which are sad simplifications of the amazing original story. They basically replace the delicious interlocking web of motives and circumstances with a linear tale revolving around the psychology of homosexuality, which to me was unimpressive and felt very tired. In addition, all the happenstance and surprising turn of events in the original story are here expunged in favor of unambiguous and immediately digestible events. I guess they figured that modern audiences could never follow the original story, and maybe they’re right. Or maybe they felt that the real story could never be done in a 2 hour movie, which I do not necessarily agree with. Think about how much information was packed into a film like Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982), for example. If you know what you’re doing, and are willing to write dialog, and are capable of writing really good dialog, a tremendous amount of ground can be covered in two hours or so. With these filmmakers, this possibility is a non-starter.

As would befit a comic book approach, there is no set up and no character development; nothing is explained, no one is even introduced. You are never told who Bill Haydon, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase are or what they each do, and it’s not entirely clear that Percy is the leader of the four of them. For the first three-quarters of the movie, these characters barely speak, and there certainly isn’t any dialog between the other characters, describing them or concerning them. They are simply presented as abstract quantities, “suspects,” and great attention (and on-screen time) is paid to filming them in ways that make them visually appear shifty and evil. But given this, how on earth can you even care about or feel any suspense regarding the search for the mole? They are emotionally interchangeable widgets, so who cares which one it is? In the original story, all four are very different characters, each with wildly different personas, different possible motivations, and each with a different history with Smiley. This movie, on the other hand, resembles a T.V. game show: they keep flashing images of the 4 baddies in front of you, as if to remind you “Which one will it be?” as George accumulates facts. It is exceedingly feeble, to say the least.

When I say “George accumulates facts,” I’m being overly kind. All the fascinating digging that George and Peter do in the real story in order to figure out what is going on is completely missing here. Rather than a dark and twisting path, here we have a well-lit superhighway: George gets the list of people Percy fired (all two of them,) interviews them, and they tell him the story; there’s nothing interesting about it. George doesn’t even have to think, really. I guess this is convenient, because with no dialog how would we ever know what he was thinking?

The lack of set up for the four suspects applies equally to George and his team. Peter’s character is a complete blank – you don’t know what he does, or what his history is with any of the other characters. All you are given is a scene where he is yucking it up with Bill Haydon in Circus headquarters. But in reality, Peter was a complete outcast, not at all welcome at Circus headquarters. Without this background, there is no real suspense when Peter has to break into the Circus to steal information, and hence these scenes fall so flat they come across almost like filler. Even Peter’s interrogation by Percy is a dud, not only because Peter’s character is so poorly constructed (for example, they omit that Peter’s nerves are suspect ever since the mole blew all his agents,) but because they also gutted the provocative ambiguity of the original Ricki Tarr story, without which the interrogation doesn’t really work. This is a pattern that repeats itself throughout the film: the filmmakers keep scenes that in the original story depended on prior plot elements that they have eliminated or changed, and even stranger, they don’t seem to realize it, or care.

As for George Smiley himself, Gary Oldman’s performance is, in a word, horrendous. It’s like a parody of Chance the gardener in Being There. Of course I should not entirely blame Oldman, because he is obviously just giving the director exactly what he wants. Whereas the George of the original story had passion, flaws, self-deprecation, cleverness, deviousness, a sense of humor, and a certain charm and grace, this George is just a face, really. An ugly face, attached to a robot. His past is a blank and he’s emotionless: he’s a robot solving a mystery. Everything human about him is out the window, with the strange exception of Anne, his wife, and this results in another laughable example of mismatched story lines. They simplify Anne’s infidelity to eliminate George’s associated psychology (he’s a robot, after all,) and then at the end they present it as Karla’s idea, unaware that their reconfigured version no longer makes sense with the story that Karla’s wanted to freeze George into inaction. Idiots!

The casting is pretty horrendous across the board, actually. They’ve cast that little homunculus Toby Jones, one of the least talented and least charismatic actors in existence, an actor who’s enough to make me avoid whole movies just so I don’t have to look at him or listen to him, as the charismatic schmoozer Percy Alleline, dynamic father figure to the other suspects. They have Ciarán Hinds right there, a much better choice for Percy, but he’s stuck playing Roy Bland, who if you got up and went to the bathroom at the wrong time you might think is mute. Toby Esterhase is supposed to be a charming Hungarian eccentric, but David Dencik plays him as a sullen, retarded teenager. And Colin Firth is a disaster as Bill Hayden – he’s way too warm and vulnerable. Bill Haydon was an cool, electrifying star player, worshiped and feared; That’s not Colin Firth, I’m sorry.

As for the casting of the other characters, Peter is too young and too much of a dandy, Jim Prideaux is too metrosexual, Control is too bland, Oliver Lacon is too undignified, and Jerry Westerby (really, Sam Collins) is too much of a doofus. Tom Hardy was well-cast as Ricki Tarr, but the Ricki Tarr character is so bungled that Hardy’s performance goes for naught.

My recommendation is that you Netfilx the phenomenal 1979 Alec Guinness BBC miniseries. Don’t bother with this, unless you want to be perversely entertained by how badly something like this can be executed.