A new old-fashioned British spy film: Page Eight

The relatively new Masterpiece movie, the British "Page Eight," has everything going for it that we have come to love and expect from so many British films, starting with great acting (that famous British tradition still extant - these actors all must come from the world of live theater rather than, as do U.S. actors, from the world of fashion runways), starting with Bill Nighy and Rachel Weisz (though either she's too young and pretty for the part or, in any case, hard to accept that she would have any romantic interest in the much older Nighy), crisp directing and really smart writing scene by scene, thanks to David Hare, and of course the fine production values - not as evident in a contemporary piece, but still, the film does capture the essence and look of a variety of contemporary London settings. All that said, Page Eight ends up fading from the mind and memory very quickly - like eating a piece of candy that just doesn't satisfy a real appetite - in that at the end it's like about a thousand other British films and shows about British spies, moles, sources, interagency conflicts, duplicitous prime ministers, overbearing subordinates, and so forth. Very briefly, story revolves around a source who claims that the PM knows and has known about secret American prisons and torture interrogations - Nighy tries to ferret out the truth, and ends up in conflict with one of his co-workers. There are some odd twists - is Weisz spying on him or not? - but ultimately I didn't find anything that distinguished this film from the masses. Though there's a nod to technology and social media - some joshing toward Nighy about his being very old fashioned, but he triumphs by using a camera that uploads automatically to "a computer" as he so quaintly puts it - the spy and counterspy techniques in Page Eight would have fit right in with a Le Carre novel: would be interesting to see a British spy film or show that really pitted the old techniques, good sources, occasional lock-picking and break-ins, against contemporary techniques, cold and analytic and dependent on technology rather than on people skills and social savvy.