Redford, You're Getting Too Old For This...

Spy Game

I'm pulling this review from the archives - it was originally written in August of 2002.

On his last day with the CIA, an agent played by Robert Redford, becomes embroiled in an international incident involving a spy named Bishop (for some reason, always an unlucky name in movies) who he trained years ago.

Over the years, I do think Redford has shown himself to be a very poor (albeit lucky) spy. You'd think he'd lie in wait for the baddies, or at least learn to keep his important files in a safe deposit box or booby trap his office. I mean in 3 Days of the Condor they ransack his office, steal files, and kill his associates... In Sneakers they do it again... and now, in Spy Game - they do it again. At least in Spy Game they don't kill anyone when they ransack his office.

Of course there is a lot of fantasy in this take on the CIA... (we all know the CIA doesn't have all it's internal phones bugged, or know unimportant details about it's long time agents - like whether or not they're married and to whom! NAH, they wouldn't know about that stuff). As usual, anyone carrying an AK can't hit the broadside of a barn (or two guys in the open on top of a hill from a helicopter - or a car in the middle of a street from an overlooking building, etc.).

On the whole, the film is a pretty good thriller of the story-told-in-flashback style. Excusing the small stuff (Brad Pitt hasn't aged a day since Vietnam), the story is both a genre picture, and a commentary on the business of spying not dissimilar to the disenfranchised cold war Hitchcockian movies of the French New Wave, though Spy Game never really elevates much beyond the level of solid genre film.

While both Redford and Pitt turn in fine performances, the thrills never reach the heights of others of it's type (check out the 80s remake of The Big Clock called No Way Out for a more thrilling take on Washington intrigue). All in all, Spy Game is enjoyable but forgettable.