Billion Dollar Brain

Very much so a 60s spy thriller. Gets weird in parts, gets slow in parts. Michael Caine, as always though, will pull you through the entire thing. The ending was a bit of a mess, but ok fine.

The greatest spy flicks have a detached, almost meditative quality to them (like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and much of the Bourne series). This definitely isn't that! It's everything the Pink Panther series parodies--it even feels like a parody itself. Ken Russell is clearly (to me, at least) bored with the spy genre and does what he can to keep himself interested (quirky camerawork, Shostakovich soundtrack). Great character work by Begley and Homolka, especially. Caine is suitably bland.

Ken Russell's trademark quirky style really saves this.

[distant]

Good film.

Harry Palmer is a much cooler secret agent than Bond, Flint, or Helm. And this movie is directed by Ken Russell, no less. Fun piece of '60s entertainment, the like of which we will not see again

Ditches the sober atmosphere of the first two Harry Palmer films and turns, more or less, into an alternate Bond movie, complete with gadgets and megalomaniac super-villain. Most of the cast look like they're having fun, but Ed Begley really takes the biscuit, hamming it up outrageously as the crazy Texan oil tycoon. That scene with him ranting against the Commies, inter-cut with the hoedown, is an absolute hoot.

The plot stays leisurely in advancing and when unraveled feels unintelligible, even for this Bond brand of spy film, merging mass-produced visual commodities with creative storytelling, where plot is usually considered extraneous. Nevertheless, the whole cast is excellent, and the film perseveres with ample deceptions, revelations and amusingly eccentric idiosyncrasies.

Ken Russel is not in his comfort zone directing a complex agent story that would need some plot-focused craftmanship; but it seems he is trying his best trying to keep it together instead of going all "kenrussell" with the material. This is not to say there are no idiosyncratic moments and elements, but perhaps not enough to get past the fuzzy plotting.