The Recruit (12a)

No central intelligence

Anthony Quinn
Friday 21 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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After last week's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, from which we got an idea of what the CIA regards as the killer élite – a TV gameshow host with priapic tendencies – this once inscrutable organisation suddenly looked rather less mysterious. I mean, who would these guys not give a job to? Short of posting a "Spooks Wanted" advert, they seemed to be ready for anyone. With alarming swiftness, The Recruit sets the record straight: the CIA is on the lookout for young people who can dress stylishly in black and look good when they run. Like models, sort of, but with IT skills.

One such candidate is James Clayton (Colin Farrell), a computer geek whose father may have been a CIA operative before he went missing in action 12 years ago. James, in need of a father figure, finds one in the shape of Walter Burke (Al Pacino), a veteran agent who taunts him into joining his recruiting "farm" at Langley. It's a sort of kindergarten for spooks, a looking-glass world where "nothing is what it seems", where mental and physical endurance are tested to the limits, and where Pacino can grandstand to his heart's content. He has played this ambiguous godfather a few times in recent years – to John Cusack in City Hall, to Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate, to Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco – maybe because he has never shaken the ghost of that Godfather, the one that made his name. I prefer Pacino in subdued mode, such as the cop sleepless with conscience in last year's Insomnia. He looks fatigued here, too, burying his bleary face in his hands, though one suspects this is weariness with the script rather than his character's moral burden. "The shit they make me speak", says his expression.

Because The Recruit, for all its mechanical slickness, isn't a very good picture. The director, Roger Donaldson, is a journeyman director who occasionally raises his game – his Cuban Missile thriller Thirteen Days was a tense historical reconstruction, and No Way Out (1987) is a reminder that Kevin Costner was once able to carry a movie. Here, Donaldson is hampered by a script that keeps repeating the Chinese-boxes trick, so that just when you think you have a handle on things, another layer is suddenly revealed beneath. David Mamet likes to use this device, too, but he rations it, and more importantly, gives it weight: there are reasons why his characters are trying to pull a fast one on each other. In this movie, it's all professional gamesmanship, a test of who can cheat most convincingly. When Clayton is kidnapped and subjected to days of savage beatings from men who want information, the audience is invited to wonder: is this a drill, too? Isn't it a bit, um, life-threatening to be a mere exercise?

One of the film's problems is that it keeps preparing us for things that never happen. Pacino tells his class of recruits, in that sonorous, fairground-barker's voice, that "we believe in right and wrong; our cause is just, our enemies are everywhere", and his promise to teach them "the black arts" – of deception, surveillance, murder – is surely pointing to a moment when theory will be converted into practice, and some trainees will actually have to deal with those "enemies". We can assume that Clayton, Burke's protégé, will be one of them, and the tough-minded beauty, Layla (Bridget Moynahan), will be another, but that's about it; there simply aren't enough characters to make it interesting. Gabriel Macht is fourth on the cast list but his part as Clayton's rival is barely written at all, and so confusing are the last 20 minutes that I honestly couldn't tell whether he'd been mortally wounded or had feigned death with a hidden squib.

Then there's the mystery of Clayton's father. Was he a CIA man, and did he die in that plane crash in Peru? The movie keeps nudging Clayton to the verge of revelation, and then pulling back, which leads us to anticipate some shock finale. I was still waiting for it when the credits began to roll. Colin Farrell, shooting quick glances from beneath his troubled brow, gives a good, compact performance as Clayton, and seems to be delivering on the early promise of his rebel-prankster in the Vietnam movie Tigerland. Yet I felt increasingly sorry for him as he tries to keep tabs on where this plot is going. The great paranoia thrillers of the early 1970s (Klute, The Conversation) understood that suspense didn't just hinge on plot; the unease had gripped the protagonist from inside, to the point where self and sanity were under threat. The writers of The Recruit, on the other hand, work on the principle that fooling the audience is the job, and pile one twist on top of another. But audiences don't just want to be fooled, they want to be moved, entertained, made to care.

While Tony Scott is hardly a paragon among film-makers, it is instructive to compare his recent spooks movie, Spy Game, with this one. The dynamic is similar, in that an old CIA hand is putting a young pretender through his paces, in this case Robert Redford passing on the star's mantle to Brad Pitt. The film isn't especially plausible – few spy movies are – but it does at least bother to establish a rapport between the pair, and makes us wonder how they became estranged. It also featured a handful of scenes that I can still remember, whereas The Recruit, with its false panels and trapdoors, seems almost designed to be forgotten. It's not terrible, just terribly unimaginative, and it pretends to be cleverer than it is. "Don't you appreciate the complexity of this thing?" cries Pacino at one point. Not really, Al, and you don't either.

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