DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER EVER TEACH YOU TO KNOCK?: The head of a CIA team of assassins David Mason (Luke Bracey) makes a dramatic entrance into a room as he chases down the person he has been assigned to kill.

Director Roger Donaldson is probably most closely associated with No Way Out, one of the best espionage thrillers ever made. Here he revisits the genre with The November Man, although this picture pales in comparison to his 1987 classic movie.

Nonetheless, Roger has managed to craft a labyrinthine cat-and-mouse caper that keeps you on the edge of your seat despite an often incoherent plot, slapdash action sequences, and an inscrutable cast of characters whose motivations are difficult to discern. Overall, the adventure amounts to a dizzying head scratcher that takes you on a roller coaster ride, even if you might need a scorecard to keep the players straight.

Based on the Bill Granger best seller There Are No Spies, the movie stars Pierce Brosnan in the title role as Peter Devereaux, an ex-CIA agent whose code name was “The November Man.” Although he had retired to Switzerland five years earlier, it didn’t take much to coax him to help extract Natalia (Mediha Musliovic), a Russian double agent, who is ready to come in out of the cold.

Peter and Natalia share a secret past which resulted in their daughter Lucy (Tara Jevrosimovic), a love child whom he misses terribly. However, the prospects of a father daughter reunion are reduced significantly when Natalia is shot in the head by a team of assassins led by David Mason (Luke Bracey), Peter’s former protégé in the CIA.

What’s up with that? Did the Agency really want Natalia dead? Or did David go rogue? These are the questions left unanswered as Peter accepts another dangerous assignment, namely, the exfiltration of Alice Fournier (Olga Kurylenko) from Moscow.

It turns out that Alice is a pivotal witness for the prosecution who is scheduled to testify at a war crimes tribunal that is about all the atrocities committed in Chechnya by Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski). However, Federov is Russia’s ruthless president-elect and he isn’t about to let some social worker interfere with his plans.

Peter quickly realizes that Alice has many angry adversaries, both Soviet, such as Federov’s henchwoman (Amila Terzimehic); and American, such as the CIA mole who is giving David his assignments. Not surprisingly, the pair leave a messy trail of bodies behind them as they pick up Lucy and make a daring escape to the West.

Very Good (**½ stars). Rated R for rape, profanity, sexuality, nudity, graphic violence, and brief drug use. In English and Russian with subtitles. Running time: 108 minutes. Distributor: Relativity Media.