A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn is a most wanted antidote to the brilliant war propaganda series by Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker and, especially, Zero Dark Thirty). Being more-or-less standard as cinematic fare it is great as a polemic piece about the modern warfare. Namely, the careerists aided and abetted by mindless squares always win leaving death and destruction in their wake.
The hero played by untimely gone P. S. Hoffman represents traditional intelligence/police methods: hiring of recruits, imbibing them with sense of the mission and internalizing it with them, etc. etc. When he is about to let off the hook a broken Chechen terrorist, a crooked Swiss banker and a mullah willing to look the other way to terrorist funding going through his charities in order to get to the really big fish in the terror international, a CIA woman with steely eyes [1] and German prosecutors arrest them all. Recruited son of the cleric is at large and will obviously become a jihadist if be believe the logic of the movie.
[1] She is played by Robin Wright and obviously modeled on the legions of State Department/CIA/NSC banshees: Wendy Sherman, Vicky Nuland, Condi Rice, Samantha Power, Meghan O'Sullivan, etc. etc.
Personal preferences of John Le Carre (Chechens as noble savages fighting off the Russian yoke in search of Western democracy) and his general pro-Moslem biases are present only in one small episode of the film where bankers approve the Islamist preacher's support list for different extremist organizations in Russia but nail him for his Middle Eastern connections.
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