“Slow Horses”, one of the finest shows that the streaming platform continues to renew, may not showcase Gary Oldman’s most remarkable performance, but it’s undoubtedly one of the funnier roles he’s ever portrayed. As Lamb, he’s caustic, despicable, repulsive, yet also incisive, even though he’s fundamentally a chain-smoking, overweight, and exhausted alcoholic who once excelled as an intelligence officer for MI6. The silver lining is, if you wish to see Oldman as another spy before he transformed into a sarcastic joke, you can in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 Cold War thriller, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
Adapting spy author John le Carré’s 1974 novel of the same name, the complex and richly layered narrative follows a cast of characters in London during the early ’70s, with Oldman’s character George Smiley at the forefront, as the British Secret Service (the “Circus”) discovers that there is a Soviet agent positioned high within their ranks. Thus, they meticulously utilize every resource available to pinpoint who that individual might be in order to pursue him without delay.