"Spy Game"

This brisk thriller overcomes its slick style with exciting espionage -- even if Brad Pitt and Robert Redford are all wrong.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 21, 2001 | There's plenty wrong with "Spy Game." The stars -- Robert Redford as a CIA caseworker about to retire, and Brad Pitt as his protégé, scheduled for execution in a Chinese prison -- don't have the authority to carry the moral weight the script intends. And the director, Tony Scott, uses a souped-up visual style (typified by the black-and-white freeze frames with legends bearing the time that punctuate the action as a device to count down the 24 hours in which the movie takes place) to disguise the fact that "Spy Game" is essentially all flashback and exposition. And the movie takes itself way too seriously for a cloak-and-dagger entertainment.

The good news is that "Spy Game" still manages to be entertaining and reasonably exciting. Scott's style may be slick and tricky but, if this and his last film, "Enemy of the State," are any indication, he's lost the glossy sadism that characterized his previous work. (I left the horrendously violent "True Romance" not knowing what I needed more: a shower or a trip to the emergency ward.) Scott seems to have learned that providing thrills isn't the same thing as working an audience over. We could probably have all lived without the sequence where a suicide bomber blows up an apartment building, but Scott doesn't linger on the blast or the aftermath. He's still a long way from having anything like a personality as a director, but there's some efficiency and craft to his impersonal technique. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the movie's opening, with Pitt posing as an aid worker to break an inmate out of a Chinese prison. Fast and tense, nearly wordless, and tightly edited, it's a hell of a good start.

"Enemy of the State" worked because Scott soft-pedaled the political conspiracy material and treated the movie as a pop thriller. "Spy Game" wants to be both a high-powered star blockbuster and to venture credibly into John le Carré's territory and the author's essentially realistic take on espionage and the moral compromises it entails. In flashbacks we see Redford train Pitt as a CIA agent, riding roughshod over the young man's moral qualms about the innocents who get hurt in the course of the Agency's operations. Redford is meant to be the pragmatic professional for whom the ends justify the means, Pitt the all-American do-gooder who can't bear the idea that his job means sacrificing the people he's supposed to help.

We watch the tension between their two approaches play out in flashbacks taking place in Vietnam, East Berlin, Beirut. In the framing story, set in 1991, Pitt is apprehended in the midst of that jailbreak and sentenced to be executed. The CIA is willing to keep the lid on his capture and allow him to be killed so as not to jeopardize upcoming trade talks between China and the U.S. Redford, long estranged from his protégé, is called in on the day he's set to retire to provide information on Pitt. When he realizes that Pitt is about to become a sacrificial lamb, he sets out to save him, using his training to delude the Agency spooks keeping tabs on him.

Nothing in "Spy Game" matches the charge of the opening, but the various flashbacks are swiftly paced, and Scott maintains a nice tension as Redford tries to stay ahead of his CIA interrogators. The script, by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata, is meant to be Redford's reckoning with the moral expediency he had always championed as just part of the job -- and it calls on his character to be selfless in order to save the young agent who couldn't stomach that expediency. But selflessness doesn't look natural on Robert Redford, who's far too self-absorbed and narcissistic a screen presence. The mantle of conscience looks unnatural on Brad Pitt as well. As always, he seems to have nothing going on beneath the surface. When a man recruited for a mission asks Pitt if it hurts to take a human life, there's no remorse or bitterness or guilt in Pitt when he tells the man "yes." He might as well be saying, "No pain, no gain."

Next Page: Why "Spy Game" lacks courage

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