Janus Metz Pedersen’s movie is short on action, but big on suspense LONDON: If your first thought on seeing Chris Pine slinking down a dark alley is that he’s starring in another Jack Ryan movie, you’d be forgiven. But while there’s plenty of suspenseful twists and intersecting story threads in “All the Old Knives,” this Amazon original is less about the show, and much more about the tell. This tense, edgy espionage thriller has a lot going on — but the vast majority of what’s going on is confined to characters sitting across a table from one another, conjuring up flashbacks and delivering pointed barbs, rather than blowing up buildings or shooting their way out of trouble. Pine plays Henry Pelham, a CIA operative sent to grill his former colleagues Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton) and Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce) about a disastrous case they all worked eight years earlier in which a group of hijackers took over a commercial flight, killing everybody (including themselves) in the process. Henry is on the hunt for a mole who fed information to the hijackers, hamstringing a planned assault on the plane, and leading to the deaths of all on board. There’s an added complication, of course, in that Henry and Celia were a couple at the time, only for the latter to flee into the night as the airplane job went south. Cue lots of intense conversations across tables. Pelham faces off against Bill in a London pub, and Celia in a California restaurant and they… well, they talk. A lot. Danish director Janus Metz Pedersen keeps the tension high, working from a screenplay by Olen Steinhauer (adapting his own novel for the screen), and letting his talented cast do the heavy lifting. Pine is engaging enough (with a tad too much Jack Ryan and James T. Kirk in the mix, perhaps), but Newton and Pryce are absolute powerhouses — dominating their scenes and delivering masterclasses in careful, balanced character acting. The pair keep the story rattling along, keep the final twists a genuine surprise, and elevate “All the Old Knives” from mediocre to mesmerizing.