Colin Farrell and Al Pacino join forces for this propagandistic, post-9/11 portrait of the CIA. [PG-13]
By: Elise Nakhnikian
Early on in his indoctrination of a new class in The Recruit, CIA recruiter Walter Burke (Al Pacino) reels off the things his students will learn at training camp. He winds up his spiel by telling them: "You will become
" "Bond, James Bond," mutters our hero, James Clayton (Colin Farrell).
He’s got a point. The ghost of Ian Fleming haunts The Recruit’s training camp, where kidnapping and torture are just part of the lesson plan, and students are taught to plant bugs, scale walls, trust nobody and kill "using a variety of weapons and using none," in Burke’s words. There’s something very ’50s about The Recruit’s propagandistic, post-9/11 portrait of the CIA. And there’s a lot of Bond in our James, a darkly handsome MIT valedictorian who can create software that makes Dell drool, vault a fence like a panther and punch a bag like Sugar Ray and who is, of course, catnip to the ladies.
Al Pacino (left) plays Colin Farrell’s duplicitous CIA mentor in The Recruit.
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But Clayton lacks Bond’s inscrutability. One of the few things we learn about James over and over again is that he’s hung up on his father, who died when he was young. The real center of this movie, despite its title, is Burke. The recruiter controls the action, just as the actor who portrays him commands the screen.
Burke burrows through James’ soft spot, first convincing him to apply to the agency (the CIA, James scoffs, is just "a bunch of fat white guys that fell apart when we needed them most") and then manipulating him throughout the training process. Pairing him with fellow recruit Layla Moore (Bridget Moynahan), he creates heat as deliberately as a boy scout leader rubbing two sticks together. Then he enlists James to spy on Layla, telling him that she’s a mole and that James is the ideal person to get under her cover because "she trusts you loves you, maybe." (You might think and I might agree that this is giving away too much, but the studio apparently didn’t; it’s in the trailer.)
James accepts the challenge and goes to Langley. His cover is to work as a lowly computer tech, reporting to a balding nerd who invites him to join the gang after work at "Senor Pepe’s Margarita Mondays!" His "real" work is hooking up with Layla and spying on her. The two quickly initiate a cozy domestic routine, making love, making breakfast and planting bugs on each other. She bugs me, she bugs me not…
Meanwhile, Burke is watching them both. Rolling his eyes and issuing orders with his patented off-kilter cadence, Burke is a familiar character, the jaundiced father figure Pacino perfected in movies like Donnie Brasco, The Devil’s Advocate and Insomnia. He says at one point that he never sleeps, and you believe it: the circles under his eyes have circles. But that hardly matters, since Pacino could surely act this character in his sleep. It’s fun to watch him have fun with it, but the only real surprise in store is whether he’s playing a good dad this time or a bad one. Unfortunately, this movie’s too obvious to keep that secret for long.
The dialogue is familiar, too, a pastiche of lines recycled from other movies, and several of Burke’s taglines are used more than once here. Pacino’s unpredictable readings manage to make even hackneyed lines like "What you see, what you hear: Nothing is what it seems" and "Rule number one: Don’t get caught" sound interesting, but pedestrian camerawork does nothing for the visual clichés cramming the movie, which relies heavily on overused sites like Union Station and the Iwo Jima memorial.
Casting Farrell, the black-eyed Irishman, who played Tom Cruise’s nemesis in Minority Report, to play against Pacino was one of The Recruit’s few interesting ideas. Good at playing men other men love to hang out with and women just plain love, Farrell is believable both as a brain and as a man of action. Like Pacino and Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco, Pacino and Farrell could probably make a good pair, the younger man’s guarded intensity playing off Pacino’s weary volatility. But they’d need a better vehicle than this deeply derivative clunker.
Rated PG-13. Contains violence, sexuality and profanity.