Brad Pitt. Robert Redford. Yum yum. One for me; one for Mom.
Two hours in the company of golden boy heartthrobs of successive screen generations could be, in itself, worth the price of admission.
But it doesn't need to be.
Spy Game's stars are only among the best elements in this superbly exciting, entertaining espionage thriller.
Director Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Top Gun), has delivered a movie that causes audiences to spontaneously applaud its cleverest bits and to give thanks throughout that the smart movie season is again upon us.
It's a genre that frequently dissolves into muddle -- think Mission Impossible. But Scott and screenwriter Michael Frost Beckner, who is also the creator of the new CIA TV series The Agency, keep it clear and coherent from beginning to end. That's despite frequent switches of territories, tenses and time zones -- and regardless of the double agents, triple crosses and hidden agendas that abound.
The set-up is as fast as the action: It's 1991 and the final day at the CIA for veteran agent Nathan Muir (Redford) until he learns that his one-time protege Tom Bishop (Pitt) has been captured attempting a daring, unauthorized rescue in a Chinese prison. In 24 hours, he'll be executed.
The young guns running the agency now consider Muir old-school, maybe even past it. They decide to pump him for information, but not let him in the loop. It's clear to us he's a smooth operator, the sneakiest spook in the place. Time spools backwards as Muir tells his story of recruiting and mentoring the missing agent.
Flashback to 1975 and Vietnam, not the harsh way it's usually rendered but a golden dream, the nostalgic way an agent might remember it for a nearly impossible mission that succeeded. Bishop, nicknamed Boyscout and barely out of his teens, hardly realizes another career has begun.
Then, to Cold War Europe, where Muir hooks him for the longterm. He trains by example and by exercise. The chemistry is delicious as the twinkle-eyed smarty pants pair dares and shows off for each other.
Spy Game is frequently very amusing, but not so much that it waters down the dark territory in which it is set. The film is tonally perfect for release at this time. Ruthless, if not heartless, these are agents of expediency, believers in necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Innocents die. Innocence fades.
Beirut, 1985, is bathed in hyperpigmented tropical richness, hinting at the intensity of what's to follow. The team's solidarity is fractured when Bishop falls for a beautiful foreign aid worker (Catherine McCormack), who may be concealing a cause of her own.
Between Muir's memories, we catch brief glimpses of Bishop, increasingly battered by his Chinese captors, the clock counting down towards his death. A death, it gradually appears, the CIA considers more politically expedient to allow than to prevent.
The scenes at the CIA could have been the movie's most dry, but they're not. Barely submerged in the professional, courteous conversations is a world of infighting, jealousies and grudges. Muir may be the king of the sting, but there are no stupes in the mix. This isn't a game of cat and mouse, but a game of cat against cat.
Cinematographer Dan Mindel has turned the movie into one long beauty shot. The camera swirls above the characters like the circles within circles of intrigue and moral ambiguity and struggles of the soul that envelop them.
As with its leading men, it makes it impossible to tear your eyes away.
(More on: Spy Game).
(This film is rated AA)
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