'The Recruit': Colin Farrell tries to save a flat screenplay
"The Recruit" at first seems to be a brunette version of "Spy Game," the enjoyable 2001 CIA veteran/trainee thriller starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. But there's a crucial element missing in the new film, despite the dark-eyed charm of Colin Farrell and Al Pacino: No one's having much fun playing this game, including the audience. Characters speak in clichéd aphorisms, the inside-out plot takes forever to get started, and Pacino keeps disappearing from the movie for lengthy periods, as if he's shooting a better one someplace else. This leaves Farrell to carry "The Recruit," and he makes a manful try at it, but his considerable charisma is no match for a flat screenplay that gives him little to do.
Farrell plays James Clayton, a smart but aimless young man who meets up with veteran CIA recruiter Walter Burke (Pacino) at a computer show, where James is demonstrating a program he's created. (Pay attention here; that program will be back. In fact, just about everything in this movie comes back, whether you want it to or not.) After a bit of cat-and-mouse, James agrees to join the CIA and heads to "the farm" — an idyllic-looking CIA training facility — to learn the ropes. This consists of listening to Burke telling him, repeatedly, "do not get caught" and "nothing is what it seems" — phrases which come in handy, sort of, when James is asked to shadow a CIA mole.
But the film's more than halfway done before the mole plot shows up, and "The Recruit" has already squandered its movie-star momentum. There are a few amusing moments — who knew that CIA eye scans could be used to find out who wants to have sex with whom? — within a plot that feels rote. And nobody seems to have thought out exactly what this film is saying. At one point, Pacino delivers a speech about how being a spy is just what you do, it isn't who you are. (It's the exact same speech delivered by somebody in "Maid in Manhattan," the J.Lo romantic comedy out last month.) But, well, nothing is what it seems, and no speech in this film can really be taken at face value. There's an interesting story lurking in here about how spies cope with real life, but "The Recruit" isn't interested in telling it.
A goateed Pacino goes through the motions, agreeably shouting his lines in that familiar sing-song voice, but never really connecting with his co-stars. Farrell, a handsome devil in three-day stubble, does a flawless American accent (he's Irish), effectively romances his female co-star (Bridget Moynahan) and occasionally flashes the kind of smile that tells you that bigger and better movies are in his future. "The Recruit" feels like a training exercise, for a star who's still in the making.
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
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