Way back in the day, as his TV series The Outer Limits was becoming too expensive, creator/producer Leslie Stevens coined the phrase “bottle show” for a budget-saving episode that minimized cast members, sets, shooting schedules and effects.
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| It begins as an intimate meal, but no: Celia (Thandiwe Newton) knows that she's actually being interrogated by former lover Henry (Chris Pine), regarding long-ago events that could leave her continued survival in doubt. |
Bottle shows subsequently became ubiquitous, with prominent — and often popular — examples on series as diverse as Star Trek, The X-Files, Friends, Mad About You, Breaking Bad and Grey’s Anatomy.
When the pandemic closed down conventional filmmaking for well over a year, innovative directors responded with the cinematic equivalent of bottle shows; examples have been trickling into theaters and streaming services during the past few months.
Some, like The Outfit, made ingenious use of such limitations.
All the Old Knives, sadly, succumbs to every possible pitfall awaiting such a shoot.
Olen Steinhauer’s 2015 novel may have been another popular entry in his oeuvre of best-selling espionage thrillers, but its adaptation here by director Janus Metz is the very definition of boring: slow, dull, overcooked and seemingly interminable. The “bottle” restraints are obvious: incessantly repeated flashbacks, relentlessly tight two-shots during sluggish exchanges between stars Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton, and ludicrously empty sets.
(A posh Carmel restaurant, with nobody else in it during an entire afternoon and evening? Puh-leaze.)
The story is pure John Le Carré territory: the eight-years-later search for a mole who compromised a critical operation in the CIA’s Austrian field office, with catastrophic results.
The year is 2020. Ilyas Shushani (Orli Shuka), a long-hunted terrorist, finally has been captured, and — just before he dies (we know not how or why, which seems odd) — he shares a juicy nugget of information that reaches the CIA’s Vienna section chief, Vick Wallinger (Laurence Fishburne). He assigns veteran field agent Henry Pelham (Pine) to investigate all staff members who monitored a horrific attack on Flight 127, grounded by terrorists at the Vienna Airport back in January 2012, when everybody aboard ultimately was killed.
Although half a dozen people were intimately involved with the unfolding 24-hour crisis — including one who committed suicide just a few months later, which seems very suspicious — Henry focuses on only two (a decision undoubtedly prompted by bottle shoot limitations, rather than anything remotely approaching logic or common sense).
They are second-in-command Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce), retired and living in London; and fellow operative Celia Harrison (Newton), retired and living in Carmel with her family.
And, small detail: Henry and Celia were lovers, back in 2012.
Which seems an insane breach of protocol, but — as Henry assures Wallinger — “I’ll know if she lies.”
Whatever.
