Hanks delivers his lines in the terse yet playful spirit of Henry Fonda. But the implication – that everyone aside from Donovan has buried their better selves – comes off as a didactic oversimplification. It’s not as if spies on either side of the Cold War were treated humanely. Spielberg wants to make a movie that stands up for the idealism of the United States, but he comes perilously close to saying that the Cold War could be won as a gentleman’s game.

‘Too easy’

Looking to inject an explosive flash of action into the proceedings, Spielberg follows the launch of the U2 spy plane, with its giant surveillance cameras. It is quickly – and spectacularly – shot down, and Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), one of its first pilots, becomes a captive of the Soviets. Donovan is assigned to go behind the Iron Curtain and negotiate a prisoner swap: Abel for Powers. The wrinkle is that there’s another US captive, a Yale grad student in East Berlin, and though Donovan has been given direct orders not to try and get him back, he won’t follow those orders. He engages the Soviet and East German negotiators in a lethal face-off, demanding that both US prisoners be given up in exchange for Abel.

Hanks’ dry assurance carries us through; he’s the ordinary citizen as ethical superstar. The movie turns into a high-stakes bureaucratic chess game: can Donovan, playing off the tension between the Russians and the East Germans, get not just one but both prisoners back – at the risk of possibly getting neither? All of this actually happened, yet as it plays out in Bridge of Spies, Donovan seems to be taking an irresponsible risk that he knows he’ll get away with because – well, he’s Tom Hanks in a big Hollywood movie. There’s never much doubt – and therefore suspense – about what’s going to happen.

Bridge of Spies is a sumptuously staged referendum on US ideals. Yet the film’s celebration of the power of political decency – in reference to the Cold War, and in terms of its implication for how we should act today – comes off as overly tidy. In Munich and Lincoln, Spielberg dramatised the wounding challenge of battling organised malevolence. In Bridge of Spies, he risks making it look all too easy.

★★★☆☆

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