A Most Wanted Man is quite an overrated movie. I’ll admit, it’s decently gripping while you’re watching it, mainly because people are constantly in danger of getting a black bag forced over their head (which guarantees a certain minimal amount of viewer interest). But its story is rather simplistic and linear, the dialog is for the most part uninteresting, the cinematography is totally unappealing, and character development is appalling bad. It’s a poorly-made film built on questionable sociopolitical ideas, and I can’t help but feeling its widespread critical acclaim is mainly because Phillip Seymour Hoffman is dead.

Compared to the hard-hitting relevance of The Constant Gardener, the intellectual content of A Most Wanted Man rings weirdly false. Its story is the dramatization of a would-be policy debate on terrorism, an internal competition between various factions of state security, and a plea for us to “come to our senses” and do things the way we used to do them during the Cold War (a George Smiley approach to terrorism, if you will). In this, John le Carré is disappointingly out of his depth. There is no honesty or understanding here about our role in creating the animosity we face in the world, much less why we create that animosity (the limitless greed and immorality of the super-rich, basically). And there’s no sentiment that perhaps we should be learning from the millions of innocent people slaughtered during the Cold War that a world of spys, torture, “disappearances”, coup d’etats, and military occupations is in fact a pretty crappy world to live in, one that we need not perpetuate and should not perpetuate.

In the now-hermetic, romanticized, “fun and games” atmosphere of the Cold War, John le Carré-type spy stories can be wonderful, although most of their appeal is probably linked to nostalgia for a less technologically oppressed era. But in our current world, spies, geopolitical violence, and feelings of us-versus-them desperately need to be replaced by respect, peace-building, true international law, and a constructive, cooperative future for humanity. There’s too much at stake and the world has become too fragile to keep fucking around, just because the obscenely rich want to exploit certain areas of the globe. A Most Wanted Man is, ultimately, a casualty of elementary moral decency, and cold, hard reality.

So the film is a dismal failure on the level of ideas, but what about its effectiveness as a simple spy tale? Well, it’s a failure there too. Not a single character besides the main character of Günther (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) commands any kind of emotional or intellectual connection of any kind; they’re just cardboard placeholders, each so generic and unworthy of mental energy that you can’t even remember any of their names once the film is over. Hoffman’s character of Günther comes across a little better, but only because you’re bludgeoned with him for the whole film, not because he’s distinctive or has anything interesting to say. The story, then, is watching these shapeless blobs being moved around a chessboard by various, equally shapeless spies. It’s nothing you’d ever want or need to watch again.

A word on the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman. For some reason, I used to run into Hoffman pretty regularly around and about New York City. He was never one of my favorite actors, but he did occasionally give performances that I really, really liked, even though they were ones that no one ever talked about (Next Stop Wonderland, Flawless, The Ides of March, and A Late Quartet). He was pretty good in A Most Wanted Man, but the film’s lack of overall quality put a definite ceiling on his performance. It’s a shame that his ultra-blessed Hollywood life was so unfulfilling to him that he had to shoot heroin to kill his pain. If drugs were decriminalized in the U.S. (as they should be), Hoffman’s addiction could have been managed medically, and he’d still be around, giving great performances. Sad.

A Most Wanted Man: It’s somewhat entertaining in the moment, but ultimately shallow and disappointing.