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Fine acting marred by overheated filmmaking

Review: 'Spy Game' crafty, but too many tricks

By Paul Tatara
CNN Reviewer

(CNN) -- It sure is nice to see Robert Redford back on the big screen again; two movies in less than a month is an unexpected surprise. It's not so pleasant, however, to see Redford's sensible acting persona mutated by hyper-agitated modern filmmaking.

"Spy Game" is a fairly interesting -- if almost hopelessly complex -- CIA picture that gets ratcheted to the stratosphere by director Tony Scott's near-romantic infatuation with his own technical abilities. You can more or less forgive him during action sequences, even though truly gifted directors know how to shoot even those with restraint. But Scott films every scene, no matter how routine, as if he's covering the launch of a nuclear missile.

Redford plays Nathan Muir, a veteran agent who gets drawn into a tense situation during his last day on the job. Years earlier, Muir secretly trained a recruit named Bishop (Brad Pitt) after Bishop successfully managed a difficult assassination in Vietnam. It seems that Bishop has now been captured while trying to free an unknown person from a Chinese prison.

The ongoing negotiation of a trade agreement between the United States and China threatens to turn his detainment into an international incident. Higher-ups at the agency want Muir to spill his guts about his old apprentice. If it turns out that Bishop isn't worth the trouble, they'll let him die in custody instead of trying to rescue him.

Forgetting the clock

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Muir's grilling forces an inappropriate story structure that deflates much of the suspense. The first scene of the movie shows Pitt being captured during his wildly innovative attempt to infiltrate the prison (he has to take pills that shut down his heartbeat for a few minutes in order to pull it off). From there on out, Bishop is dealt with almost entirely in flashbacks, as Redford describes Pitt's training program and the various intrigue-laden situations that have made him one of the best agents in the field.

We're informed that Bishop will be executed in 24 hours if something isn't done for him, but you keep forgetting all about the ticking clock while you watch Redford turn Pitt into a CIA operative.

Twisting information piles on top of more twisting information as Muir determines that the guys at the agency aren't telling him all they know about Bishop. Since Muir's portion of the story is taking place in the present tense, his interrogation starts to feel like the most relevant part of the narrative, even though we know Pitt is being brutalized back in China. This is supposed to be a deadly game of cat and mouse, but you wind up getting all huffy because a bunch of conniving office buddies are lying to Robert Redford.

In the camera eye of a storm

Redford goes all shifty-eyed when he feels something isn't right, which, of course, is most of the time. He's really not the proper actor for the role. Muir's cold-hearted cunning seems like an affectation; by now, we're too familiar with Redford to really believe it.

Pitt fares a lot better. When he's actually given the opportunity to act, as opposed to hopping out of the way of Scott's endlessly zooming, booming, tracking, and panning camera, he's quite effective. One scene in particular, in which he tries to calm a non-CIA doctor who's been asked to kill a patient, is a surprisingly human touch in an otherwise machine-tooled assault on the senses. He also has a few effective moments with beautiful Katherine McCormack, who plays a cagey humanitarian aid worker.

Scott, for his part, badly needs to calm down, but you can bet he won't. The upcoming Gene Hackman-Owen Wilson picture, "Behind Enemy Lines," is shot exactly like "Spy Game;" if it weren't for the stars involved, you wouldn't be able to differentiate between the footage.

Scott's "accomplishment," then, is really nothing more than the next step in putting viewers in a sensory hammer lock. When you step into a peaceful theater lobby after watching "Spy Game," you feel like somebody has turned off a lawnmower.

"Spy Game" is loaded with the kind of rat-a-tat-tat violence that can pass for porn if you're obsessed with high-tech weaponry. People get blasted to bits in a wide variety of apparently groovy ways. There's also a Middle Eastern car bomb that brings down a building, a sight that, two months after September 11, can still sicken you more than it used to.