We have no feelings at all about any of the CIA bosses, and indeed by the end of the film do not even know if they are supposed to be right or wrong (they seem to be doing exactly what Redford taught Pitt to do). At the end of the movie we still know next to nothing about him (and so, his bosses realize, do they), but he embodies the values the movie is too impatient to establish, and so we sympathize with him, and there's a trickle-down effect: We sympathize with Pitt because Redford does, and we sympathize with McCormack because Pitt does. (These scenes span the years from about 1965 to about 1991, during which the characters look about the same.) What saves “Spy Game” from death by style is the Redford performance, which uses every resource of his star persona to create a character from thin air.

Pitt meets McCormack in Beirut, where she is a nurse and something shadowy besides, and that's where they fall in love, although a movie this fast-moving has no time for conversations and tenderness, and so we have to accept their relationship on faith. and China.Īs Redford is quizzed by his masters, flashbacks show him meeting Pitt in Vietnam and later using him in operations in Berlin, Beirut and Hong Kong. The framework is 24 hours during which Redford must scheme, lie and deceive in order to save Pitt, who the Agency plans to sacrifice nothing must upset top-level trade talks between the U.S. Now Pitt is in a Chinese prison, captured in the act of helping Catherine McCormack escape, and it's Redford who was responsible for her being there. It stars Robert Redford as a veteran CIA spymaster, on his last day at work, and Brad Pitt as the young idealist he recruited after Vietnam. That's not so say the film is without interest.

We see it less as a story than as an exercise. Oddly, although both movies have about the same running times, the slower pace of “The Tailor of Panama” makes it seem shorter than the fast pace of “Spy Game.” Scott's restless camera, with flashbacks and whooshes, resists our attention it moves so fast that things don't seem to matter so much, and because it discourages contemplation, we don't develop a stake in the material.

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