By Owen GleibermanFeatures correspondent

The great director’s latest, Bridge of Spies, is a Cold War thriller starring Tom Hanks. Our critic Owen Gleiberman thinks it lacks the gravitas of Spielberg’s best work.

The name Steven Spielberg used to imply a certain breathless cinematic showmanship. Characters surged in and out of his gliding-camera shots with such organic flow that it was hard to believe the images had been choreographed; even amid the abyss of Schindler’s List, the sheer spectacle of Spielberg’s genius could make your jaw drop. In recent years though, he’s evolved into a different kind of film-maker – a kind of restrained virtuoso. More than ever, Spielberg is drawn to historical subjects, which he taps for their relevance to our own condition. But  now he’s willing to let the truth of history express itself through words as much as images. He’s become a new breed of studio classicist.

The results have sometimes been brilliant. Munich, his masterful thriller from 2005, turned the aftermath of the 1972 Olympic Games hostage crisis into a Hitchcockian meditation on the theme of national vengeance and why attempts at it are destined – politically and spiritually – to fail. Lincoln, his staid but revelatory presidential biopic, used Abraham Lincoln’s battle to end slavery as a way to dramatise what politics is really about: slow-motion warfare accomplished by any means necessary.

Spielberg’s new film, Bridge of Spies, is a Cold War espionage drama that begins in 1957, and it would like to be of a piece with those two previous landmarks. But this one, suavely crafted as it is, is a little too cozy and thin in its perceptions. It centres on a New York insurance lawyer, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), who is tapped by the CIA to defend an accused Soviet spy: Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a sad-sack artist who’s been hunted down in his Brooklyn apartment and taken to prison. No one thinks Abel is innocent, but Donovan, at least, sees his humanity, and the government needs to show that he’s receiving a fair trial.

Donovan, however, refuses simply to go through the motions of justice. At the trial, he fights for his client, making a plea to dismiss key evidence because a search warrant was never obtained. When a CIA operative (Scott Shepherd) hunts Donovan down and gives him a scolding, explaining that the issue at hand is much larger than any one trial, Donovan scoffs, explaining that what defines the United States is its willingness to play by the rules. It’s a sign of what’s right – and wrong – with Bridge of Spies that I watched that scene with my sympathies torn between Donovan and the scurrilous CIA representative of US power (the movie, of course, wants you to side with Donovan).

Hanks delivers his lines in the terse yet playful spirit of Henry Fonda. But the implication – that everyone aside from Donovan has buried their better selves – comes off as a didactic oversimplification. It’s not as if spies on either side of the Cold War were treated humanely. Spielberg wants to make a movie that stands up for the idealism of the United States, but he comes perilously close to saying that the Cold War could be won as a gentleman’s game.

‘Too easy’

Looking to inject an explosive flash of action into the proceedings, Spielberg follows the launch of the U2 spy plane, with its giant surveillance cameras. It is quickly – and spectacularly – shot down, and Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), one of its first pilots, becomes a captive of the Soviets. Donovan is assigned to go behind the Iron Curtain and negotiate a prisoner swap: Abel for Powers. The wrinkle is that there’s another US captive, a Yale grad student in East Berlin, and though Donovan has been given direct orders not to try and get him back, he won’t follow those orders. He engages the Soviet and East German negotiators in a lethal face-off, demanding that both US prisoners be given up in exchange for Abel.

Hanks’ dry assurance carries us through; he’s the ordinary citizen as ethical superstar. The movie turns into a high-stakes bureaucratic chess game: can Donovan, playing off the tension between the Russians and the East Germans, get not just one but both prisoners back – at the risk of possibly getting neither? All of this actually happened, yet as it plays out in Bridge of Spies, Donovan seems to be taking an irresponsible risk that he knows he’ll get away with because – well, he’s Tom Hanks in a big Hollywood movie. There’s never much doubt – and therefore suspense – about what’s going to happen.

Bridge of Spies is a sumptuously staged referendum on US ideals. Yet the film’s celebration of the power of political decency – in reference to the Cold War, and in terms of its implication for how we should act today  – comes off as overly tidy. In Munich and Lincoln, Spielberg dramatised the wounding challenge of battling organised malevolence. In Bridge of Spies, he risks making it look all too easy.

★★★☆☆

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o67CZ5qopV%2BYwq3A1KucaJmiqbakuMRoaWlpZWZ9cYSMn6ClpV2nsre1xLBkm6qZmbSmec6fZKyomZrAbrXSZqWorF2ku6Z5zp9krKiZmrmjsdGgqmaalajB