Spy Game

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source: Spy Game

What is wrong with some of you people? Hollywood feeds you the same crap over and over and yet you gobble it up indiscriminately just the same. 1. Robert Redford is friggin' 65 years of age for God Sakes. No amount of soft lighting is going to change that. 2. Use some Goddamn makeup. If we are to believe that Brad Pitt's character was back in Nam, he shouldn't look EXACTLY the same many decades later. 3. Just because Redford's character is "old school" shouldn't mean that all of his "new school" superiors should be posed as complete idiots. 4. I neither give a damn about the cliche of Pitt's character risking it all for a woman. 5. Nor do I give a damn about Redford's character coming to the realization that he's become emotionally hardened by the spy game and should make an attempt at redeeming himself. 6. Flashbacks are rarely a convincing plot device. Hence, don't use them! 7. This film creeps at a snail's pace. 8. Mr. Scott, we already saw all of that amazing (but frenzied) aerial camera work in Enemy of the State (1998). There it was creative and useful. Here, in Spy Game, it's just silly and distracting. 9. In all, I found Spy Game so totally uninvolving, I was ready to walk out the theatre after the first 20-minutes. Too bad I didn't. 6/10

Spy Game may be labeled as a thriller, but it's really a drama/love story. Brad Pitt plays a spy who ends up in a Chinese prison facing execution in 24 hours, so it's up to his mentor, it's-my-last-day-at-work Redford to try and get him out. This is done sitting in an office reminiscing on past events for the entire length of the film. The focus of the film is not on spy training or even spy business,rather it's a film about Pitt's doubt as to whether or not what he's doing is right. How much fun is that to watch? Well, it isn't. It's pretty damn boring. I'm not a huge fan of flashbacks, and considering that this film is essentially one long flashback, it's really hard to like. Tony Scott tries to hide the fact that almost nothing happens over two very long hours with an array of helicopter shots, fast editing, and bombastic music. It may look exciting, but it isn't. Then there's the many illogical (or more like really stupid) plot holes that raises a lot of questions: The film takes place over several years, yet nobody seems to grow any older/younger. If you're a spy, is it such a good idea to be talking about your job in public, all the time? How come that everyone at the CIA are morons? Does Robert "My face is looking suspiciously tight" Redford's spy training only include sneaking a peek at top secret papers (he does it at least three times)? Why did the script have to be of the kind where problems are solved by constantly using suspension of disbelief, ("Hmm, I could really use a satellite photo of a shoreline looking exactly like the one I want to steal... But wait, I just happen to have one lying here in my desk, next to the money I just happen to need to bribe some Chinese guys to cut the electricity on a couple of islands, so that our choppers can fly in and raid a prison."). The ending also feels weird. The entire film establishes Redford as a smirking heartless assassin, who in the end is celebrated (with a choir singing on the soundtrack) for getting his not quite so ruthless protégé out of prison. Of course, he also made sure that Brad's terrorist girlfriend got out after a couple of years in prison, which was the right thing to do, considering that he put her there in the first place. On the whole, Spy Game may look like a critique of the dirty work the CIA does, but scrape on the surface, and you'll find that they really justify and glorify their actions. In other words, it's the same kind of propaganda as always. On the plus side though, it's not quite as awful as The Recruit. [2/10]

Hey, I like spy and action movies as much as the next guy, but this movie was pretty bad. If you were to assemble a list of the top 100 Hollywood cliches, you could probably find 99 of them here. It goes on and on with improbable scenarios and that horribly annoying "zip around fast forward" scene change technique. Oh, and that cliche boy's choir soundtrack. Redford is way too old for the flashback scenarios. How about a little makeup for those? I doubt there were many 75 year old operatives in Vietnam. More plodding and inane plot devices twisted it from a potentially good story to an overdramatized tale of inept bungling. Maybe it's "real"... we hear a lot about the CIA bungling everything. All right, it's not a total write-off, but I'm pretty sure you could find better things to do with your time than watching this.

Spy Game will probably never be considered among the best spy movies to come out of Hollywood, however, it is a really entertaining movie with quite a few surprises. The movie is set in the early 1990's. Nathan Muir (Redford) is a retiring CIA officer who learns that his former protégé Tom Bishop (Pitt) has been captured while attempting a prison rescue in China and will be executed shortly. CIA brass want to know what motivated Bishop to attempt this unauthorized action and they interview Muir to find out. Muir tells the story of how he met and trained Bishop: from Vietnam to Berlin to Beirut. While Muir is setting the background, he is also working secretly behind the scenes to free Bishop. Will Muir's cloak and dagger antics be discovered before he has a chance to free Bishop? Overall the movie is not as good as other spy genre films such as Three Days of the Condor, Spy Who Came in From the Cold, or Hunt for Red October. I think Redford does well in the role of the retiring, slightly jaded CIA officer Muir. Pitt does well with what he's given, though I think his character suffers from poor writing, especially near the end of the film. Think of Spy Game as a more sophisticated Mission: Impossible (that's no knock on M:I) and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

You should expect a few anachronisms and factual errors in any film set more than ten years in the past. But this movie is completely full of them from beginning to end, and it was made not even ten years after when it was set. That's the first howler, the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 not 1992! Where do we start with the rest: if Brad Pit had been a tasty young hunk in 1992 how could he have also been a hardened assassin in Viet Nam, probably before he'd had time to have been born. How come the folk's in Beirut were chatting on cell-phones in 1982, years before they were available in the rest of the world, and when a car phone was literally that, a phone that required a car to move it! And what about the natty 2001 style thin monitor computer on the agent's Beirut office desk! Then what about the gigantic ten year gap in the plot between Brad character's girlfriend being caught and his going to rescue her, which is presented as an act of passion? Not only did it simmer well but she looked not a day older after ten years in a Chinese prison! Then that rescue.Who but an idiot would imagine that a p3 in the CIA has the authority to authorise an act of war on China! And if they did, only two choppers! And clapped out 40 year old old Huey's, when the USMC have been flying Black Hawk's since the Eighties. A stupid error made all the more glaring by the pilot of one referring to his machine as "Black Hawk One." Oh, I geddit, they are the same two Huey's they used in the Viet Nam scenes. Or maybe they are meant to be THE SAME TWO HUEYS that appeared in those scenes. You see, I don't know, in a film this full of temporal worm-holes anything is possible! Or maybe they should have spent more money on hiring choppers and less on the ridiculous overblown sound-track with its tiresome clichés comprising plaintiff choirboy's and Arabian vocal pirouettes and a clumsy abuse of themes from Vaughn-Williams. As you may well imagine, my only reason for sticking to the end of this film was to see what more "howlers" were in store. It seems to have been written by a twenty-something with an absolutely shameful and absolute ignorance of anything before the present. It is an appalling indictment of this director that he would put his name to such a thing.

SPY GAME / (2001) *** (out of four) Tony Scott is known for his big budget, fast-paced, action-packed extravaganzas. His latest film, "Spy Game" is no exception. He takes advantage of a massive budget, but loses sight of human comprehension. It's difficult to grasp his moral when it's awash in a superficial style where individual shots seldom last more than thirty seconds, and where dialogue never exceeds the length of a short paragraph. There's not much time to introduce characters, situations, or even locations-datelines appear on the screen to identify times and places. Yet, it doesn't just feel as if we are in another movie by Tony Scott-everything feels very real. The danger is real. The characters are real. Many action films are about the action, special effects, and car chase sequences. "Spy Game" does contain those things, but they are in a focused, tight, evocative thriller. This movie is about the characters, not the action. It never forgets that. "Spy Game" contains a complex structure. We begin in 1991. Veteran CIA officer Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) prepares for retirement. On his last day, he learns that his one-time protégé, Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt), has been captured in a foreign prison on a charge of espionage and will be executed in 24 hours. Fearing international crisis, the CIA decides it would be too risky to save him. But with a new generation in control of the agency, Nathan is no longer an insider. He must outsmart his own agency in order to save his old friend. Most of the film plays out in flashbacks as the CIA digests valuable information from Muir. The movie spans from the Vietnam war to the end of the Cold War, with years ranging from 1965 to about 1991 (although the characters don't seem to age much). We learn Nathan chose Tom as a sharpshooter in Vietnam. He trained with Bishop. They formed a close bond, until something came between them-a woman. The forty-year span in time poses no problem for "Spy Game." The engaging screenplay, by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata, focuses on only the necessary characters. The soundtrack, by Harry Gregson-Williams, masterfully captures the various time periods, spicing the scenes with a slick sense of style and intrigue. The cinematography by Daniel Mindel makes the differences in location clear. Christian Wagner's editing gives the movie a frenzied, almost rushed emotion, that puts us right in the middle of the race against time. Pitt and Redford retain their ground, despite a thick style. Redford creates a character out of nothing. We know little about him at the beginning, and we know little about him at the end. But he somehow gives his character a conscience, human values, and a lot of interest. We care about him because we do not like the black and white CIA operatives. Thus, we care about Pitt's character as well. Pitt gives his character an immature nature. He is in a stereotypical young hotshot role that might have fit him better a few years ago, but he still creates a grave sense of panic and fear. With a structure like this, we expect subplots to evolve from the flashbacks. There is an intriguing terrorist story. A love story. Themes about betrayal, trust, position, friendship, commitment…but "Spy Game" never slows down and allows us to absorb these important details. By the end, we feel exhilarated, and we know we just watched a very smart, well-crafted film, but the most we can take from it is that it is a very smart, well-crafted film. I think, beneath all the style and surface, there is a little more to the movie than that.

Spy Game is funny,interesting and action of first category.The story is about the rescue of Tom Bishop(played by Brad Pitt)a spy who is in jail in a prison in China.Everything happens in a terrible time when the US is in negotiations of peace with China.So the CIA doesn't mean to save the body of the agent, who is ward, of Nathan Muir(Redford,the best in the picture).So Muir has to rescue Bishop in 24 hours so he's going to be executed by the chineses. The story is all told in flashbacks.But Tony Scott was very competent telling the story in a very modern way,as usual!He is used to do a very interesting game with the cameras.Showing quick scenes and a fast rythman.The story is incredible and you won't be disapointed!If you liked Enemy of the State which was made by the same director you'll like a lot this motion picture.Two thumbs up!!!

I made the mistake of only watching this film once the first time around. I did end up buying it, though I was never sure why. Then, years later, I got around to watching it again... and again... and again... While Spy Game is so fast-paced that it's difficult to keep up the first time around, I think that's what makes it such a great DVD. There are performances in this movie that defy description. You almost get a sense that if you were to meet him in the street, you'd get someone named Nathan Muir playing the part of Robert Redford - the transformation is that complete. In several scenes, but especially the scene on the Berlin rooftop, Redford gives a performance that is unlike almost anything I've ever seen in cinema. It's that perfect. Brad Pitt also does an amazing job, but Redford steals the whole movie. I had to re-watch Spy Game three times before I felt I got a complete understanding of everything going on. There is almost nothing given away for free in this movie - none of the standard Hollywood "shove-it-in-your-face-so-you're-sure-to-get-it" fare. Every decision, most plot points, and a lot of what would normally be called "meaningful looks" are written on Muir's face for a split second, then they're gone. This is one of the few movies that's intellectually challenging to watch. It takes patience and a quick assessment of each scene to understand and keep up. None of the acting is over the top or explicit; most everything is controlled, subtle, and delicately handled. All in all, Spy Game is an exceptional movie, IMO, to watch and in some ways to study.