All the Old Knives

As spies and ex-lovers, Thandiwe Newton and Chris Pine craft a reserved chemistry in Janus Metz's romantic espionage thriller 'All the Old Knives'

The film is a compelling concept that doesn’t thread the needle of its competing impulses quite as gracefully as it might have, but driven by the imminently watchable Newton and Pine, it makes for the kind of adult-oriented storytelling one wishes there was more of these days. The film’s big love scene is more dramatic than erotic, though it does include a heat and passion that is missing from much of the rest of the film. Such is the aim of “All the Old Knives,” a cerebral thriller with an elegant sensibility directed by Janus Metz from a screenplay by Olen Steinhauer adapting his own novel.

Loves and loyalties collide in slow-motion for Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton in this sluggish CIA thriller with promise but no payoff.

Elsewhere, screenwriter (and author of the original novel) Olen Steinhauer could maybe have used some help to help tighten things up, just as director Janus Metz Pedersen is in sore need of an editor to lift the mood. It’s weird to see a male action star play someone their own age for once, and Pine settles into the more seasoned dramatic role well, but Newton outshines him. Walking into a bar that only serves wine to try and order a vodka martini, Henry Pelham (Pine) is a very Chardonnay 007 – colder, sadder and far less exciting than the stuff you see in other movies, though probably a lot more realistic.

All the Old Knives (15A) stars Chris Pine as Henry Pelham, a CIA veteran who travels from Vienna to California to interview his former colleague, ...

This article discusses the ending of the Amazon film All the Old Knives, which will contain spoilers Ready Steady Cut film critic M.N. Miller said about.

She and the CIA have planned an operation to catch Henry as the mole. She begins to cry and is sick to her stomach. So, as he questions her at a bar in the middle of wine country in present-day, Henry begins to feel sick and starts bleeding from the nose. It was not Henry’s call, and he was already gone when he went to save him. It’s the same number she found when going through phone logs that she thinks is of the terrorist behind the plane jacking. It led to Henry, yes, Henry, being the mole.

Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton's spy thriller on Amazon Prime Video All The Old Knives is out now - read the ending explained to find out whodunnit.

At the table, a dying Henry tells her he loves her and demands Celia leave the restaurant, which she does. In the aftermath of being tortured by the Russians, he and his family fled to Iran where his daughter died, because they couldn't get medicine for her thanks to US sanctions. Celia reveals that after their asset was killed, she went back to Henry's place and while he was showering, she heard his phone vibrate and saw that an Iranian phone number was calling. Back in the past, they receive another message from their asset on board, who now says that the hijackers in fact have a camera on the undercarriage, and he tells them to abort their mission. Her suspicion is confirmed when, later, the plane door opens and their asset is shot in the head and dumped onto the tarmac. In the 'present day' Henry also visits Bill, threatening him to turn on who Henry suspects is the mole: Celia.

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.

The puzzle-box mystery of the new Prime Video spy thriller is reminiscent of Westworld... but the actress likes the more streamlined nature of film.

But I love these kinds of movies where it's placed in an environment, in a situation, that is actually familiar to us now." "It's a tricky film to make in some ways because people aren't necessarily primed for these love stories anymore," Newton says. "I do prefer film because there's an intensity and a need to complete the story in an hour and a half," Newton says.

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.

Agents on hand include Henry Pelham (Pine), Celia Harrison (Newton) and Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce). The situation quickly goes south. It's tragic. And eight ...

Why? As Henry and Celia’s double-entendre dinner progresses, the scene cleverly segues from professional to personal interrogation: Hey, I know what happened back then was awful and a lot of innocent people died, but babe, why’d you leave me? All the Old Knives is a sexy and absorbing medium-hot potboiler that layers in a few too many flashbacks but nonetheless holds our interest. They sit down at a practically empty restaurant, the type that only has wine on the drink menu and where the server really gets into the details of the compote on this and the glaze on that. Our Take: It makes sense: How else do you expect two inordinately attractive human beings to relieve the stress of a high-tension CIA gig? As they eat dinner, feeding each other succulent forkfuls of locally sourced this and delicately coddled that, Henry and Celia drill into the this and that of the hostage tragedy, which are intricately entwined with some of the this and that of the drillings into each other. Like, take care of it take care of it?

The Amazon Original spy thriller All the Old Knives follows a CIA case gone wrong, with the cast & characters figuring out the inside mole's identity.

Here’s a breakdown of the cast and characters of Amazon Prime’s All the Old Knives. Bill Compton was the CIA's second-in-command and Celia’s boss, who became a father figure to her in Vienna. Before seeing Celia, Henry met with Bill and accused him of being Flight 127’s mole. The majority of All the Old Knives’ tension relies on the chemistry of Henry and Celia at their present-day meeting. All the Old Knives then flashes back to the fictional Flight 127 crisis where a terrorist group hijacks a plane headed for Austria, with the agents trying to decipher if extremist Ilyas Shushani is involved and, more urgently, how to save the passengers on board. Told through flashbacks between ex-lovers and CIA agents Henry and Celia, All the Old Knives slowly reveals that no character is exactly what they seem. Amazon's spy thriller All the Old Knives recruits a talented cast to portray characters connected to a past CIA disaster.