The most interesting and remarkable part of "Spy Game" is the opportunity to observe how much Brad Pitt resembles Robert Redford in his (much) younger days. The rest is a fatuous and banal waste of time (I saw it on a transcontinental flight and had no choice but to suffer through it).
The movie seems to have been thrown together simply as a vanity piece for Mr. Redford, who walks through the very familiar role of the "renegade" CIA man, reluctantly forced into doing good and outsmarting the bad guys (at the CIA of course). Banal devices such as locations and times printed across the bottom of the screen to accompanying urgent typewriter sound effects cannot save this "B Movie" from the drastic holes in its plot, and outrageously far-fetched scenarios. Mr. Redford's character looks remarkably the same in scenes supposed to be thirty years apart (Vietnam in the late '60s and ultimately during his final days before retirement from the CIA in the '90s). Brad Pitt's character does not appear to age at all from a young sergeant in Vietnam (about 20 years old) to a CIA "contact employee" who would thus be at least in his mid-forties during the film's setting in the 1990's. The film's producers and directors seem to be of the opinion that movie fans there to see poster-boys Redford and Pitt will overlook the preposterously flimsy storyline, and lack of any coherent plot. Pitt's character's training as a cold war CIA operative appears to consist of nothing more challenging than a series of fraternity initiation pranks ("I want to see you get in that building and standing on that balcony in fifteen minutes"). Redford's tweed-jacketed CIA Far East analyst strolls through the CIA headquarters making secret calls on his cell phone on his last day at work and cleverly arranges for an armed attack inside of a foreign country with a hand forged paper(apparently without any consequences or international reprecussions) to serve his own purposes. (Remember how agitated the Chinese got when one of their jets crashed into that US surveillance plane? What do you think they'd do if armed helicopters and soldiers attacked an installation well within Chinese territory?) The ostensible romance between Pitt's character and an English social worker is pivitol to the plot, but is barely addressed. Poorly conceived, and badly written, "Spy Game" is as idiotic as it is inept.
The movie seems to have been thrown together simply as a vanity piece for Mr. Redford, who walks through the very familiar role of the "renegade" CIA man, reluctantly forced into doing good and outsmarting the bad guys (at the CIA of course). Banal devices such as locations and times printed across the bottom of the screen to accompanying urgent typewriter sound effects cannot save this "B Movie" from the drastic holes in its plot, and outrageously far-fetched scenarios. Mr. Redford's character looks remarkably the same in scenes supposed to be thirty years apart (Vietnam in the late '60s and ultimately during his final days before retirement from the CIA in the '90s). Brad Pitt's character does not appear to age at all from a young sergeant in Vietnam (about 20 years old) to a CIA "contact employee" who would thus be at least in his mid-forties during the film's setting in the 1990's. The film's producers and directors seem to be of the opinion that movie fans there to see poster-boys Redford and Pitt will overlook the preposterously flimsy storyline, and lack of any coherent plot. Pitt's character's training as a cold war CIA operative appears to consist of nothing more challenging than a series of fraternity initiation pranks ("I want to see you get in that building and standing on that balcony in fifteen minutes"). Redford's tweed-jacketed CIA Far East analyst strolls through the CIA headquarters making secret calls on his cell phone on his last day at work and cleverly arranges for an armed attack inside of a foreign country with a hand forged paper(apparently without any consequences or international reprecussions) to serve his own purposes. (Remember how agitated the Chinese got when one of their jets crashed into that US surveillance plane? What do you think they'd do if armed helicopters and soldiers attacked an installation well within Chinese territory?) The ostensible romance between Pitt's character and an English social worker is pivitol to the plot, but is barely addressed. Poorly conceived, and badly written, "Spy Game" is as idiotic as it is inept.