Gemma Arterton’s Rogue Agent Is a Spy Story Too Tasteful for Its Own Good

The true-story raw materials for Rogue Agent would more typically be fashioned into either a fascinating magazine article or a watchable but overlong streaming miniseries. To whatever extent that it works as a feature film is largely attributable to Gemma Arterton. This might seem counterintuitive—not because Arterton is a bad actor, but because she tends to switch, as needed, between a few dependable, unremarkable types. There’s the restless-in-love object of desire (Tamara Drewe; Gemma Bovery); the plucky WWII figure (Their Finest; Summerland) and the British-pulp soldier (Quantum of Solace; The King’s Man), with some obligatory and forgettable Hollywood love-interest roles along the way. This mix of star quality and genericism is perfect for Rogue Agent, whose effectiveness depends on a lack of certainty over what genre, exactly, it will occupy.

To give away too much would spoil the movie’s modest entertainment value, though the movie itself might telegraph enough to do that anyway. It opens in the early ’90s, with Robert (James Norton) recruiting several English university students for an MI5-driven mission to stop an IRA plot. It’s a tense, low-tech little intro—and if you’re unfamiliar with the real-life story, it’s surprising to see the movie then jump forward a decade, when Robert meets Alice (Arterton), a successful lawyer. He sees her every day during her walk to work, and he’s attracted to her. Her resistance stays just barely more intrigued than wary, while his persistence stays just barely more charming than pushy, and they begin seeing each other. But how will his secret-agent lifestyle fit in with this new relationship? Is this a movie about Gemma Arterton getting recruited for a stealthy mission, or Gemma Arterton navigating the perils of semi-modern love?

These questions may occupy some audiences longer than others. It helps, obviously, to have a fascination with Arterton, whose particular Britishness somehow encompasses both stiff-upper-lip perseverance and singleton dissatisfaction. She’s a crisp beauty with just a hint of ungainliness, and when the script calls for her to tell her new would-be suitor to fuck off, she hits precisely the right note of confident exasperation. Her ability to appear equally likely to swoon or haul off and punch someone works well in a movie that gradually reveals itself as a different sort of procedural than it initially appears. Norton, meanwhile, has the showier role of the two leads, as a man blessed with the gift of providing reasonable-sounding excuses, which is also an actor’s curse: Any moment where he seems less than authoritative serves to undermine the character. Sadly, there are a few such moments in this movie, pushing a sense of creeping suspicion about Robert too close to the fore, too soon.