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It's success at any cost.
People are pawns for what major players consider a higher goal.
Tony Scott's thriller Spy Game is set in 1991 against the backdrop of President Bush's trade talks with China.
A CIA operative named Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is being held in a Chinese prison as a spy. The Americans have 24 hours to intervene or he will be executed.
The hitch is, the top brass would rather not get involved and are searching for a reason to sacrifice their Bishop in this political chess game.
In steps Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) a 30-year veteran with the CIA, who trained Bishop and was his mentor for more than a decade.
Though Muir and Bishop severed communication after a tactical disagreement in Beirut in the 1980s, Muir makes it his personal mission to save his former protege.
This is not the kind of Clint Eastwood or Sylvester Stallone action movie where Muir steals a jet, flies to China and single-handedly sneaks into the prison and frees Bishop.
Redford's Muir has to do everything from one of the conference rooms at CIA headquarters where top brass are meeting to determine Bishop's fate.
These sequences are by far the film's most effective.
Redford's laconic demeanor works remarkably well in creating tension because it is obvious to the audience he's actually frantic, but can't let his colleagues know.
How he manages to get the information they are keeping from him is ingenious and entirely credible.
What the top brass want from Muir is information about Bishop that they can use against the man.
This necessitates flashbacks to Vietnam, Berlin and Beirut that are supposed to be the action highlights of the film, but they are far less effective. Bishop's foiled mission in China, which opens the film, is the most exciting sequence, promising future thrills that never materialize.
The final rescue mission is so lacking in suspense and tension one longs for Sly or Clint to steal a jet and storm the prison.
The obligatory love story seems imposed on the film, though Catherine McCormack makes relief worker Elizabeth Hadley enigmatic enough that she could be using Bishop as much as he is using her.
In their few scenes together, Pitt and Redford prove to be excellent dramatic foils. Where Redford is restrained, Pitt is exuberant.Where Redford is intellectual, Pitt is emotional.
Because much of the action in the CIA headquarters is static, Scott goes wild when the action goes outdoors. His cameras spin, weave and zoom in on action.
It's so obviously an artificial attempt to impose excitement on what is essentially an intellectual chess game between Muir and his colleagues. (More on: Spy Game).
(This film is rated AA)