The movie opens with a brief flash-forward. Government assassin Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) blasts his trainee, David Mason (Luke Bracey), for disobeying orders in an operation that was supposed to thwart an assassination but ended up causing a child's death. Five years later, David is ordered to kill a former Russian double-agent named Natalia (played by Mediha Musilovic) who broke into the office of the soon-to-be-elected president, Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski). Why? Without giving too much away, let's just say that the CIA is up to no good, as is so often the case in movies and life, and that a self-interested power broker inside the agency wants to prevent the information that Natalia stole from getting out and embarrassing the agency. Unfortunately for whoever did this, Devereaux has a deep bond with Natalia. He embarks on a mission of revenge that also requires him to find a young woman named Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko) and prevent her from being killed by his former student David or by Russian agents (including Amila Terzimehic's Alexa, a leggy mute whose stare could burn holes in concrete). Meanwhile, David tries to thwart or kill his old mentor—as the film itself jokes, he has daddy issues—while grappling with the suspicion that his lethal proficiency and loyalty are being abused for selfish purposes, in an off-the-books CIA operation whose outlines he can't discern.
Nobody in the cast makes much of an impression except for the old pro character actors and Brosnan, who is perfectly cast as Devereaux. Handsome and lean but grey and haggard, he has twenty years' worth of experience playing these sorts of men, starting with his version of James Bond, a colder, more self-loathing version of Ian Fleming's super spy than fans were used to seeing. "I might as well ask you if all those vodka martinis ever silence the screams of all the men you've killed, or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women for all the dead ones you failed to protect," another agent asked in "Goldeneye."
"The November Man" is based on the seventh in a long-running series of novels about Devereaux by Bill Granger, but there are times when it seems to be a direct answer to that question, which Brosnan's Bond answered with a knowing, faintly sad look. Devereaux is a highly functioning alcoholic who downs hard liquor the way other people drink water, and he admits to Alice that he has no life to speak of; he's just a warm-blooded cipher living as far off the grid as he can, and trying to keep his personal relationships secret from the global espionage community so that they cannot be used against him. At one point Devereaux, who apparently quit the CIA out of slow-building revulsion, lectures his former pupil on the need for moral clarity, telling him that you can be a man or a killer of men, "but not both, because one will eventually extinguish the other."
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