One of the first things CIA recruits are taught is to trust no one.

Then they are constantly reminded that nothing is what it seems and that everything is a game.

Like the students at the training farm in the new spy thriller The Recruit, opening today, audiences are urged to remember these three adages.

It's also important to know as little as possible about the plot or the film's central characters because, when it comes to enjoying this flick, even a little knowlege is a dangerous thing.

Which brings us to the trailers for The Recruit - which give away every major plot and character twist in the movie.

The film's press kit stresses that "The Recruit is a pyschological thriller with twists and turns where you're never sure who the good guys are or what's going to happen next."

That is, unless you've caught those trailers with certain characters romping in the sheets or warning each other about third parties.

What you can know about The Recruit is that Colin Farrell is James Clayton, a brilliant recent graduate of MIT.

Understandably, the giant computer companies want him on staff, but so does the CIA.

Walter Burke (Al Pacino), the top recruiter for the CIA, is determined to get Clayton and he has an ace card.

Burke knows Clayton suspects his father was not an oil company executive but a CIA operative who died mysteriously on assignment in 1990.

Burke knows Clayton will figure he can learn the truth about his father if he can get inside the CIA.

Burke has his ulterior motives for recruiting Clayton.

That's not a film spoiler but obvious from the way Pacino plays Burke: all mysterious, teasing and manipulative.

At the training farm, Clayton meets fellow recruits Layla (Bridget Moynahan) and Zack (Gabriel Macht), who seem to know each other and converse in a Middle East dialect.

Could one, or both, or neither of them be a spy?

The Recruit would like to think of itself as Robert Redford's 1975 classic CIA thriller Three Days of the Condor, which was packed with suspense, twists and surprises.

In reality, it's much nearer to Redford's tepid 2001 CIA thriller Spy Game which, like The Recruit, was too transparent to produce nail-biting suspense.

Pacino sleepwalks through the role of Burke.

He dips into his bag of acting tricks and comes up with equal doses of ranting, glowering, grinning and shifty-eyed observing.

It's annoying - and pretty scary for the safety of America - that Clayton, Layla and Zack are supposed to be the brightest new minds in the agency and they can't figure out what the audience can see coming an hour into the flick.

Since his American film debut in Tigerland, Farrell has displayed an intriguing intensity that makes him extremely watchable.

Farrell is able to make us believe Clayton is completely unaware of who to trust.

Now if only director Roger Donaldson could have done the same for the audience, The Recruit would have been a true mind-bending thriller.

(This film is rated PG)

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