Movie Review: All The Devil’s Men

A former Navy SEAL-turned-black ops specialist, Jack Collins (Milo Gibson) tracks and assassinates terrorists for the CIA, handling the jobs that are too hot for official sanction, terminating with extreme prejudice. Tormented by his own personal demons, he’s had enough, all he wants to do is return to the US to his wife and to the infant son he’s never met.

When former CIA deep cover agent-turned-jihadi McKnight (Elliot Cowan) tries to buy a stolen nuclear warhead from some Russian gangsters, Collins’ CIA handler offers him one last job, dispatching him to London to hunt the traitor down and recover the warhead. Rendezvousing with fellow operatives Brennan (William Fichtner) and Samuelson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), Collins and his team question friend and former comrade Deighton (Joseph Millson), hoping to get a lead on McKnight’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, Deighton, an ex-member of British Special Forces, now makes a very lucrative shady living as a mercenary, hiring out his services to the highest bidder. And McKnight is his latest client!

Barely surviving a deadly ambush, Collins and his team find themselves hunted by Deighton and his private army as the War on Terror erupts on London’s streets…

Marking the welcome return of British writer/director Matthew Hope who gave us 2011’s dark, gritty urban thriller The Veteran, All The Devil’s Men is as lean, mean and taciturn as it’s star Milo Gibson (son of Mad Mel); a solid, visceral little no-frills action thriller that’s been pared to the bone, precision-tooled to get your palms sweaty and your pulse pounding. Despite its constant betrayals and double crosses, its battleground of shifting allegiances and hidden agendas where everyone is expendable, All The Devil’s Men script offers few surprises but Hope keeps things moving at breakneck pace, bouncing from one percussive gun battle to the next as the characters warily circle each other in a dance of death, the action scenes brutal, visceral and immediate (Hope definitely enjoys splashing brains across concrete).

While the wonderful Sylvia Hoeks who was so impressive as replicant hit woman Luv in last year’s Blade Runner 2049 has little to do but sit on the sidelines looking shifty for much of the film, manipulating heroes and villains alike, she’s better served than bad guy Elliot Cowan. With his mid-Atlantic accent Cowan maybe isn’t the most convincing homegrown jihadi and his potentially interesting character, the spy who goes native and joins the terrorist cause, is rather overshadowed by Joseph Millson’s cheerfully amoral and vicious mercenary who skewers both the best lines and anyone within knife range, the perfect foil for Gibson’s haunted hero and their scenes together bristle with the tension of the sourest of bromances. Brawny and charismatic, there’s a coiled stillness to Gibson’s performance that proves he’s just as lethal a weapon as his old man (see what I did there?).

Tense, violent and brutal, Matthew Hope’s All The Devil’s Men is an exciting, refreshingly cynical thriller that deserves a much bigger audience than it’ll probably get. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another seven years for Hope’s next film.