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All-Reviews.com Movie/Video Review
Spy Game
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 out of 4
Review by Susan Granger
2 stars out of 4
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It doesn't add up. The movie-makers take two generations of hunky
box-office stars - Robert Redford and Brad Pitt - and put them in an espionage
thriller and it winds up looking like an episode of "The Agency." Of course, the
fact that the murky plot was co-scripted by Michael Frost Beckner, who writes
the TV series, should have been the tip-off. Redford plays Nathan Muir who is
set to retire after 30 years at the CIA when he learns that his "Boy Scout"
protégé, Tom Bishop - that's Pitt - has been captured in China. Realizing that
The Agency brass will disown any connection to Bishop, Muir concocts his own
devious, elaborate, long-distance plan for a rescue. But not before repeated
flashbacks, showing us how he recruited Bishop in Vietnam in 1975 and
subsequently trained him in West Berlin and Beirut in the nasty, ruthless
intricacies of the spy game. Sipping aged Scotch, the maverick Muir obviously
cares more about saving his operative than preserving a new USA/China trade
agreement. With "Top Gun," "Crimson Tide" and "Enemy of the State" to his
credit, director Tony Scott knows how to keep the pace fast in an
action-adventure. Problem is: he doesn't give us any emotional connection to the
two men. That, plus the inherent moral ambiguity, means we don't make an
emotional investment in the outcome. Noting, "I'm old school," Redford is
convincingly evasive as he's grilled by CIA bureaucrats, but Pitt's role is so
vague and underwritten as to make him a cipher. Catherine McCormack surfaces
briefly as a British aid worker with compromised loyalty. On the Granger Movie
Gauge of 1 to 10, "Spy Games" is a frenetic but ultimately floundering 5. It's
shamelessly slick but shallow. Rent "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) to see
Redford play a far more interesting CIA analyst.
Copyright © 2001 Susan Granger
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