Flak Magazine: Review of Spy Game, 12-2-01

Spy Game paints Hollywood's latest portrait of professional spooks. Again we are invited to eavesdrop on the coded conversations of secret agents and tail them as they step silently among the shadows. Keep alert and the mercenary procedures of the CIA and the ugly realities of international affairs will surely be revealed. Spy Game is going to put us in the know, or so it and other movies in its genre promise.

These spy films always present themselves as some kind of misplaced passkey; it's the essence of their allure. Most citizens without high-level security clearance can only imagine how the US government wages its continued covert "intelligence" war, where the battlefield is the world, the casualties don't often make the evening news and the goal is usually unclear. And because we receive so little information about how our liberties or petroleum are secured, we turn to our storytellers for clues.

Spy Game confirms the worst of fears without blowing its entertaining cool. Opening with an inventive rescue mission inside a hellish prison in China, the film quickly establishes its equally gritty and glossy style. CIA agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) infiltrates the prison ward by pretending to be part of a medical inoculations team. In short order, he squirts gel into his palm, slips a couple pills under his tongue and shakes hands with a few thousand volts. Electrocuted and pronounced dead, Bishop is left alone on a gurney, where his body cools and his blood begins to circulate again. He gets up and searches for his target among the inmates — but is captured.

In the United States, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford), a world-weary spy who has been benched among bureaucrats at CIA headquarters, is a day away from a peaceful retirement. Muir's office is already boxed up, his secretary has been reassigned and he lustfully guards a poster of his tropical getaway. Before he even clocks in for his final shift, Muir is tipped off that his protégé Bishop has been captured in China and is scheduled to be executed within 24 hours.

The CIA bosses are prepared to let Bishop die. They view his mission as rogue, embarrassing and politically costly. Muir, of course, has other ideas and works from inside the agency to save the colleague he groomed for more than a decade. As he works to free Bishop, the movie flashes back to their first meeting and earlier missions.

Spy Game's tempo mirrors a storm — lightning followed rhythmically by thunder, with danger as constant as heavy rain. Director Tony Scott keeps the senses stimulated with sweeping aerial shots and a lighting design that makes the center of the action vibrant and taints the corners with foreboding darkness. As a movie, Spy Game succeeds.

As the most recent peek into the US intelligence community, Spy Game appears to be akin to Three Days of the Condor, which also stars Redford, then a clueless young agent. While subtler and more comforting in its message than Condor, Spy Game pointedly accuses the CIA of eating its own.

That might not seem like startling news, but it's a message rarely delivered at the movies. For all of Hollywood's re-creations of American international spies, only a handful of movies condemn the whole system. Often when the CIA appears to be too barbaric in a film, the atrocities are attributed to some renegade within the system. The offending loose screw is tightened or removed. The system is cleared and continues.

Spy Game does not offer a fall guy for the CIA's dirty tricks and cruel behavior. By chronicling the relationship between Muir and Bishop from Vietnam in the early '70s to Beirut in the mid-'80s, the film shows the inhumanity of intelligence work. Muir and Bishop use people for information and abandon them to die if the heat gets too great. Muir does it with chilling ease; Bishop does it with growing disgust.

Condor openly finds the CIA's practices immoral. It was released in 1975 after the country had lost much of its trust in government thanks to Vietnam, a rash of domestic assassinations and Watergate. Produced before we were preoccupied with terror, Spy Game builds the case that the CIA is efficiently amoral. With a cool nod, the film argues for a clear point: Somebody has to soil their hands, so the rest of us can go to the movies.

— Rasheed Newson (rasheednewson@hotmail.com)