director
Tony Scott
screenwriters
Michael Frost Beckner
David Arata
producers
Douglas Wick
Marc Abraham
cinematographer
Daniel Mindel
music
Harry Gregson-Williams
editors
Geraint Huw Reynolds
Christian Wagner
cast
Robert Redford (Nathan Muir)
Brad Pitt (Tom Bishop)
Catherine McCormack (Elizabeth)
Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Gladys)
Larry Bryggman (Troy Folger)
Stephen Dillane (Charles Harker)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 123m
u.s.
release: 11/21/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other tony
scott films
reviewed on this website:
- domino
- the fan
(1996)
- true
romance
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The tiniest things can take
you out of a movie, and often the spell-breakers have more to
do with you than with the movie. So I confess the following quirk:
In general, if there's a sequence in an English-language film
spoken in another language with subtitles, and a word in one
of the subtitles is misspelled, it's hard for me to believe anything
else that movie tells me. Spy Game commits this sin against
teachers everywhere within the first ten minutes (the word in
question, in case you wondered, is "inoculations" --
or, according to the film, "innoculations").
But then it's a measure of
how uninvolving a movie is that something so minuscule and silly
can register so jarringly. Spy Game is of a breed I'm
not terribly enamored of -- the big Hollywood intrigue thriller
-- but I went to it hoping for some electric byplay between Robert
Redford, the Brad Pitt of his day, and Brad Pitt, the Robert
Redford of his day (the two, of course, have bonded cinematically
before -- Redford behind the camera and Pitt in front, for A
River Runs Through It). Unfortunately, they get only a handful
of scenes together, none of which play off the old-lion-passing-the-torch-to-the-young-cub
subtext we expect. Once Redford and Pitt signed on, couldn't
the screenwriters (Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata) have
had some fun with the meeting of past and present icons?
Redford is Nathan Muir, the
sort of cynical CIA veteran who has a half-torched flag hanging
in his office. In 1975, in the twilight of the Vietnam War, Nathan
took a promising soldier -- Tom Bishop (Pitt) -- under his wing,
instructing him in the art of espionage. We see this, and other
past dealings between the mentor and his protege, in flashbacks;
the heart of the story unfolds in 1991, when Tom has been captured
in China after a botched attempt to free a prisoner. The movie
thus spans fifteen years of experience, but despite the cinematographer's
best efforts, Tom looks the same age in 1991 as he does in 1975,
and, rather embarrassingly for Redford despite some obvious makeup,
so does Nathan.
Flashback structures like this
one are nearly impossible to bring off, because Tom, for us,
exists almost entirely in the past. Nathan keeps launching into
anecdotes while sitting in CIA meetings (the agency wants to
leave Tom in China to be executed, not wanting to risk America's
fragile trade relations with that country); some of the stories
may be fudged -- Nathan doesn't trust the CIA personnel as far
as he can throw them, and may be tossing in or leaving out details
meant to confuse them -- but after a while you stop caring what's
true and what isn't. The movie is essentially a long meeting,
allowing Redford to hold forth, grin cynically at what's become
of his agency, and coast on his matinee-idol charisma. Pitt fares
even less well -- wasn't he supposed to be yearning to stop doing
this sort of Hollywood fluff? Spy Game regresses him back
to 1997 and the days of The
Devil's Own.
Director Tony Scott strains
to keep things moving -- boy, does he ever. At several points
he gives us a black-and-white freeze frame reminding us of the
deadline to save Tom from execution; it's a bad, laughable idea,
and will look as goofy twenty years from now as similar flourishes
in '70s movies look today. But Scott, a marginally talented hack
who's managed to avoid wrecking a couple of good scripts (True
Romance and Crimson Tide), can't shoo away the
feeling that we're spending two hours waiting for the movie to
get started. We get tired action bits in the flashbacks, and
then we keep going back to Nathan playing tired cat-and-mouse
games with CIA fools. By-the-numbers scripts like this are what
Hollywood should be inoculating itself against -- excuse me,
"innoculating."
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