Every few years someone asks, “What ever happened to Jeremy Irons?” And then he pops up as Alfred in Zach Snyder’s “Batman” and “Justice League” and in the “House of Gucci,” where, with his usual charm and woolen suits, plays a son of the great Gucci.

Irons is very much here in “Munich: The Edge of War,” a soft, dark and occasionally nail-biting espionage thriller set in the middle of the 1938 Munich Conference and based on the writer Robert Harris’s best seller, as the naive dying Neville Chamberlain, British PM who tried to make peace with Hitler.

German director Christian Schwochow (“Novemberkind,” “Cracks in the Shell”) begins “Munich” with introductions at a garden party, set in Oxford University, where we are introduced to the main players, Paul, Hugh, and his girlfriend Pamela, (Jessica Brown Findlay of “Downton Abbey”) happily drunk on champagne and full of youthful ambitions, who will walk, and eventually flee through the dark clouds of the late 1930’s.

We meet the fresh-as-laundered linen Hugh Legat (George MacKay “1917”) who will, as the story leaps ahead six years, become a rising star in the diplomatic halls of the British government, and start a family with Pamela in London.

Six years have also darkened the somber student German Paul von Hartman (Jannis Niewohner) a fiercely patriotic German, who is stunned and shocked by the brutal rise of Adolph Hitler, and joins an underground group with the help of an old friend Joan (Anjli Mohindra as Josie Chancellor in the ITV series “Dark Heart.”)

There are two important pieces on this chess board. One is a secret document laying bare Hitler’s deception and plans for world conquest, that Paul was given and now carries in a simple brown folder.

The other is the gun in Paul’s pocket, along with a dangerous idea smoldering in his broken heart.

And then there is Irons, flawlessly etching the cool Neville Chamberlain, the pawn Hitler moves back and forth to gain precious time.

We finally come to Hitler, the worst of the dozens of Hitlers, played with over-the-top satanic guttural snarls and “Rosemary’s Baby” eyes, by Ulrich Matthes, who only needs a whip, black hat and cape to star in a road company melodrama. It’s almost a fatal casting mistake.

We’ve seen an album full of Churchill movies by now to be able to follow the truth, before director Schwochow falls back into writer Harris’ fiction.

MacKay, with his pale English face and playing the pivotal role of Legat, has a healthy resume in his pocket and a future in UK’s film world.

“Munich: The Edge of War” is a nice, warm fire to chase the chill of winter, but lacks the deep and satisfying intelligence, and superb cast of 2011’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

We deeply miss the great John le Carré, do we not?

“Munich: The Edge of War” currently streams on Netflix.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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