USA Shares Amazing TREADSTONE Clip on Eve of Premiere

USA's Bourne spin-off series Treadstone premieres tomorrow night. While I've been surprised by the paucity of advertising in the real world, the network has released many, many clips online over the past month--enough, seemingly, to create a fairly good assembly cut of the pilot episode! But they've saved the best for last. A clip with an extended fight scene and a chase across European rooftops shared today by the International Spy Museum really demonstrates that they appear to have captured the tone and feel of Doug Liman's 2002 movie The Bourne Identity. (The lead actor also seems to have been cast at least partly for bearing a slight resemblance to Matt Damon.) This has me very excited to sample the series tomorrow night! Watch the clip here.

Read my review of the novel that started it all, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, here.

Treadstone premieres on Tuesday, October 15, at 10/9c on USA.

First Trailer for Olen Steinhauer's Berlin Station

Richard Armitage (Strike Back, MI-5) returns to spying in the upcoming EPIX series Berlin Station, but this time he's not working for MI5 or Section 20, but for the CIA. Berlin Station was created by acclaimed spy novelist Olen Steinhauer, whose trilogy of Milo Weaver novels (starting with The Tourist) are pretty much the benchmark for modern espionage fiction. Steinhauer outlined for Deadline at the TCA Conference this week what sets Berlin Station apart from "lone wolf" spy series like Homeland, 24, or Bond movies. “A crucial difference,” the author pointed out, “is that in Homeland, you’re following Carrie. She is the focus. It is her drive that gets things done.” In the real world, however, he claims that's “not how intelligence works. Intelligence is networking. Intelligence is multiple people working together.  [Berlin Station] was always suppose to show ... normal people with an abnormal job. They have to work together. There are no superheroes. Intelligence is an ensemble.” That mantra is apparent from the trailer above (which is really more of a clip), in which Armitage's character, a case officer newly assigned to the titular posting, meets his new colleagues. The contemporary spy drama from Paramount TV debuts on EPIX on October 16.

Watch the First Five Minutes of Haywire Online

Relativity Media has put up the first five minutes of Steven Soderbergh's action-packed spy movie Haywire on Hulu. You can watch it here. Pretty cool, huh? Well, that only gives you a taste of all the action in this movie. And each fight scene is staged and shot differently, keeping things interesting. Haywire is a surprisingly good action movie, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again. Read my review of the film here.

New Clip From Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

I like it! Nothing earth-shattering here, of course, except that we're seeing a whole scene between two IMF team members who are not Ethan Hunt, which in itself is a good thing because it's a sign that the rumors might be true; we might actually be getting more of a genuine team movie this time out, in keeping with the far superior TV series! But the scene also demonstrates what director Brad Bird told the LA Times last week: "It's a little more playful than the other Mission: Impossible films." I like the humor in this scene, and I particularly like that it provides a new spin on a very old M:I trope: the mission planning sequence. These scenes were always too serious on the show for any exchange of this sort, but can you imagine Willy or someone stopping Barney in the middle of a tech-heavy computer speech to question him the way Jeremy Renner does to Simon Pegg here? I think it would have made for a good moment back then, and it clearly does in the present.

Clips From The Debt

Clips From The Debt

Spy fans are being really spoiled this fall. There are a ton of spy movies hitting North American theaters between now and December. Off the top of my head, we've got Colombiana, The Debt, The Killer Elite, Safe, Johnny English Reborn, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. I'm sure I'm leaving a few out. Focus Features doesn't want The Debt to get lost in that shuffle, so they've released a few cool clips to remind us that this is an old-school spy movie to be excited about. If there's one thing (besides Elke Sommer) that I really love in a spy movie, it's Wall crossing. I just love scenes of agents using whatever means necessary to sneak into East Berlin or escape back into the West. And that's exacly what we get in this clip:



The Debt has a lot going for it even beyond Wall crossing. It's partially set in the Sixties (the greatest era of espionage, on film anyway), it's from the writers of X-Men: First Class (Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Peter Straughan) and it stars spy vererens Helen Mirren (RED), Jesper Christensen (Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace), Marton Csokas (The Bourne Supremacy), Ciarán Hinds (Munich, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and Tom Wilkinson (The Ghost Writer, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) – as well as Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain. And it's only a few weeks away! The Debt opens on August 31. Here's the official synopsis:

In this espionage thriller, shocking news reaches retired Mossad secret agents Rachel (Mirren) and Stefan (Wilkinson) about their former colleague David (Hinds). Back in 1966, the trio (portrayed, respectively, by Chastain, Csokas, and Worthington tracked down Nazi war criminal Vogel (Christensen) in East Berlin. At great risk, and at considerable personal cost, the team’s mission was accomplished – or was it? The suspense builds in and across two different time periods, with startling action and surprising revelations.

See a bunch more clips and a making-of featurette at the official website.