I never watched the television show Spooks so have nothing invested in the characters or any history they might have from watching the ten series of BBC TV’s Spooks. So I went into this with open eyes.

Watching gritty, realistic, spy thrillers is always a nonsense because in real life real spies are fat middle-aged businessmen when they get caught and real government assassins tend not to get found out about ever. So to watch this film you have to except that really, it’s silly stuff-n-puff. A huge pinch of salt is definitely required before the film even starts.

Talking about silly stuff the film starts on the most ridiculous premise, the CIA’s most wanted terrorist is being transported across London and they get ‘stuck in a traffic jam’. There are no cleared routes for this most dangerous of terrorists and the escort is two cars with four agents and two guards in the transporter. Therein lies the problem with this film – you start off with a flawed premise and then the viewer just ends up seeing all the others because falling down huge plot holes with improbability spikes at the bottom are not fun.

The acting is very British TV acting, so not awful but not particularly great either, you can see the screen craft as it appears on the screen, head holding, sideways glances and so forth. Kit Harington was surely cast just because of Game of Thrones but in all honesty he did well with a slightly stereotyped role but nothing special, Tuppence Middleton is badly miscast but the rest do as best as they can with their roles.

To me the whole thing seemed slightly amateurish and a bit clichéd but throughout the story the huge plot holes and absurdities kept bubbling to the surface. Adem Qasim was surely the most insipid and toothless terrorist in celluloid terrorists. Who exactly was he supposed to be representing? He didn’t want to kill civilians? He would give everything up for his wife? I thought he was driven and the most dangerous on the CIA’s books? If so, he did not appear so.

Despite this the film was watchable until the final quarter when MI5 seemed fairly easy to break into and hold hostage the top directors. Just go down and ‘access passage’ in the carpark – are you sure? Then Will Holloway turned Ethan Hunt taking down a particularly slow and dozy seeming Adem which was followed in the aftermath by both Will and bad-ass Harry strolling out of the carpark of a recently attacked MI5 unimpeded. For goodness sake let’s try to keep in grounded.

In all this was a vanilla film, it wasn’t poor but it was so similar to many others and in all honesty seemed more budgeted as a TV movie or extra-long Spooks special.