Spy Game
Directed by Tony Scott; starring Robert Redford (Nathan Muir), Brad Pitt (Tom Bishop), Catherine McCormack (Elizabeth Hadley), Stephen Dillane (Charles Harker), Larry Bryggman (Troy Folger), and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Gladys Jennip).
Despite dialogue like, "We need the press on this like we need a third tit," Spy Game isn’t entirely awful. Unfortunately, it isn’t entirely engaging either.
In Tony Scott’s tale of treachery and redemption, Robert Redford stars as Nathan Muir, an old-school CIA operative. On his last day at the agency, he awakens to the news that his protégé, Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt, looking scrumptious as always), has been captured in a squalid Chinese prison while on a rogue mission. Set in 1991, the seizure has taken place just days before scheduled trade talks between the United States and China. The CIA seems perfectly happy to let Bishop perish for the sake of free commerce. Muir has 24 hours to save his disciple.
Wearing a tweed sports coat and horn-rimmed glasses, Muir spends much of the movie debriefing a group of Navy blue suits about Bishop’s history. The tales are relayed through a trio of flashbacks: their first encounter in Vietnam; Muir’s recruitment of Bishop in West Berlin; and their final liaison in Beirut, where Bishop’s love affair with a British aid worker (Catherine McCormack), along with an increasing sense of guilt over the innocent pawns whose lives are destroyed in the name of democracy, devastates their relationship.
Despite their riff, Muir still wants to save his buddy. Between his tales of espionage, Muir surreptitiously struggles to orchestrate Bishop’s release behind the agency’s back.
Like so many almost-entertaining mainstream movies, long before the Ju Ju Fruits have had a chance to metabolize, Spy Game – which provides a perfectly tolerable two hours of snazzy if superficial visuals and a suitably sinuous story line – is destined to recede into the nether regions of the mind never to be recovered again. Why?
Because lines like, "We needed twice the sex with half the foreplay," don’t a classic make. – JoAnne Steglitz