This review was originally published on Liveforfilms.com

For fans expecting hard edged espionage, a Tinker Tailor Soldier Spielberg, adjust expectations accordingly. Light in tone and laced with comedy—a machination of the Coen Brothers’ contributions to Matt Charman’s screenplay, no doubt—Bridge of Spies shares the same broad entertainment as last year’s spy movie The Imitation Game. Instead of Alan Turing and code deciphering spy games, Bridge of Spies credibly recreates the cold war tensions of the 1950s. Two spies, the downed spy plane pilot Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and Russian agent Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), an undercover on American soil, are set to be swapped. With relationships between the United States, Russia, and East Berlin coming to an intense boil, the stakes are high: if this deal goes badly, it could mean nuclear war.

To facilitate the delicate trade in East Berlin is aw shucks and the American Way Tom Hanks, playing the smart and swift insurance lawyer James Donovan—a character so folksy, innately patriotic, and kind spirited that in the same way Ethan Hunt is indistinguishable from Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks is perceptually inseparable from James Donovan. Only Tom Hanks can command the needed level of believable optimism for Donovan without missing a beat, and his shoulders, proverbially made of red, white, and blue, muscle through this disjointed, uneven, but nonetheless engaging movie.

Sadly Spies isn’t just similar to The Imitation Game in their shared interest in pleasing an audience—a goal they’re pretty good at—but in the exact way that they go about it. To the frustration of historical purists, each movie reduces a morally complex, tragic story into what ultimately boils into feel-good fun. This is all the more inexplicable in how, in the case of Spies at least, the rest of the movie’s style vividly clashes with the serious subject matter (an incoherence especially obvious next to Janusz Kaminski’s grim, monochrome cinematography) as well as next to darkest moments of the script—including a massacre of a family (politely) filmed from afar. Life around the Berlin Wall was prolifically brutal. This is a dark story in which Spielberg has turned the lights on, an error that no amount of snappy direction can forgive. For the world’s most famous and loved director, one persistent flaw is how so many of his movies struggled to finish on the appropriate note, like the contrived uplift endings of Minority Report or War of the Worlds. Bridge of Spies extends this widely-written-about flaw to the entire movie.