The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!
Kremlin villainy reigns in a slew of Hollywood thrillers and spy pics, new and forthcoming.
If there's an upside to the crisis in the Ukraine -- and let's face it, in the real world there isn't – it's that Hollywood has rediscovered its favorite bad guy: the Russians. A reliable film foe since the end of World War II, and a staple of Cold War espionage capers from Bond to Smiley, the Kremlin kingpins and covert operatives trolling Moscow's hidden lairs – not to mention the Russian mob, busily pursuing their various, nefarious enterprise – have resurfaced with renewed vigor, and villainy. Never mind the North Koreans, Somali pirates, those jihadist terrorist cells. Give us Boris Badenov, updated, of course, for the new Millennium.
In the just-released Pierce Brosnan cloak-and-daggerer, The November Man, it's a would-be Russian president with a secret war crimes past who triggers the action. In The Equalizer, coming Sept. 26, Denzel Washington faces off against a demonic Russian uber-pimp working Boston's Back Bay. A group of angry Russians pose problems for Johnny Depp in the 2015 art thief caper, Mortdecai.
Steven Spielberg will be directing his Saving Private Ryan star, Tom Hanks, in an untitled Cold War espionage piece based on the true story of James Donovan, the American attorney enlisted by the CIA to secretly negotiate the 1962 release of Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 spy plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union. In The Bourne Betrayal, set to start production next year with Jeremy Renner in the lead, some of the hugger and mugger takes place in Odessa, and involves a drug lord whose name has a distinctly northeastern European ring (try Edor Vladovich Lemontov). Rooney Mara and David Fincher, star and director, respectively, of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, are reportedly circling Red Sparrow, a modern-day thriller about a Russian spy agency seductress and the CIA agent who comes under her spell. Based on the 2013 Jason Matthews bestseller, it's being adapted by American Hustle screenwriter Eric Warren Singer. Vladimir Putin is a character in the book -- and not a sympathetic one.
And while plot details for the 24th James Bond film (to star Daniel Craig, to be directed by Sam Mendes, and to start shooting in December) and the fifth Mission: Impossible (directed by Christopher McQuarrie, starring Tom Cruise and just wrapping production in Europe) have yet to revealed, how can there not be at least a couple of menacing Muscovites lurking in the shadows?