This film reconstructs a crucial episode of the Second World War, starring the British Intelligence Service, which tried (and managed) to outwit Hitler by making him believe that the Allied troops were preparing an offensive in Greece when in reality Sicily was the target (in the complicated strategy Spain played an important role, and some Spanish actors appear briefly in the film).

John Madden, a solvent filmmaker without a recognizable signature (his most famous film is Shakespeare in love, although it is not exactly the direction that we remember most about it), has made a neoclassical film, ageless cinema, using the traditional codes of spy movies, treated in an erudite way.

Already at the beginning there is a quote from John Buchan and his book The 39 Steps. One of the characters is an aspiring writer named... Ian Fleming (as you know, before creating 007, Fleming worked in the Intelligence Service). And there are also repeated allusions to the brother of Ewen Montagu (impeccable Colin Firth), the officer who carried out the operation; Well, the brother is none other than Ivor Montagu, who was a notorious communist as well as a film director, screenwriter and producer of some of Hitchcock's timeless titles during his British period, including the version of The 39 Steps: Everything Is well tied here.

Seasoned with a love story, El Arma del Deceit is an efficient work of craftsmanship made with good retro taste: the texture of the image, the colors, the settings and the costumes pursue a certain old-fashioned romanticism that reminds us, not to leave out of the time and place of fiction, to Peter Hyams's Goodbye Street, David Seltzer's Glow in the Dark, or Robert Zemeckis's Allies, even some evocations of the past by filmmaker Terence Davies, from Distant Voices to The deep blue sea.

It doesn't have the quality or cinematic grit that would make it a lasting work, but it's nice and tonic, never boring, and features a handful of actors who are a joy to watch and hear (in the original version, of course).

Directed by: John Madden

Contents: Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Jason Isaacs

Production: Great Britain-USA, 2021. Thriller.

Score: **