Review of Bullet to Beijing

Michael Caine slips comfortably and amusingly into one of the most famous roles of his career, Harry Palmer (AKA the anti-Bond), after a 30-year break. The film itself is both pleasingly old-fashioned (much of it takes place on a train, by far the most traditional means of transportation in this genre), and successfully updated to be relevant in the mid-1990s, post-Cold War era, where spies from all over the world are suddenly labeled "redundant" by their governments. And yet, the murky, complicated games of espionage still go on, only with new objects and new players now (but old friends and old enemies as well). The story is slightly meandering in the middle but it has its surprises too, and the film is well-produced (especially for a TV project); the relatively (in comparison to James Bond) small scale of its action sequences generally works in their favor. It's been a long time since I last saw the final theatrical Palmer film, "Billion Dollar Brain", but I think "Bullet To Beijing" is superior to that one at least. **1/2 out of 4.