“Spy Game” - Spy Lame?
by Carrie Zwiebel on December 10, 2001 in Culture
After a week of spending too much time in Taubman and Littauer, and basically spending no time with my boyfriend, I decided to treat him to the movies this past Friday. I probably could have talked him into seeing Life as a House or some other “date movie” but as a thank you for making sure I had clean clothes to wear to school and for generally putting up with my crazy KSG schedule, I let him pick. Who can guess the end of this short tale? You got it, we saw Spy Games.
It wasn’t my first choice, but I got sucked in right away. About ten minutes into the movie I realized that I was literally holding on to my chair and forgetting to take full breaths - and it’s not even because of Brad Pitt (but I’ll get into that later).
The basic plot line is that Robert Redford, on his last day of work at the CIA, has twenty-four hours to save the life of his protégé, Brad Pitt, who has botched an attempt to break someone out of a Chinese prison. The trick, of course, is that for political reasons the CIA has decided to let Pitt die there-but not before they find out as much as they can from Redford about whom Pitt was trying to save.
The movie then launches into a series of flashbacks, beginning with Pitt and Redford’s first meeting in Vietnam. It then follows them to the espionage filled world of Berlin of the late 1970’s and then Beirut. As time goes on we learn that although Pitt is quite the assassin and a budding spy-and here is the shocker-his heart gets him into trouble time and again. For his part Redford is always trying to teach him to be a better spy, giving him “rules” that an agent never breaks - I’ll leave it up to you to see if Redford breaks all of his own rules to save his beloved student.
In between the flashbacks, we witness Redford being interrogated by the biggest bumbling idiots one could ever imagine working in the CIA. It’s not just that he is the smartest man in the CIA, but that everyone around Redford, except for his loving and faithful secretary, is at every moment ten steps behind him. I mean I know it is suddenly in vogue to knock our government, but am I really supposed to believe that the CIA can’t even figure out this man’s birthday or the number of times he has been married - and yes, bizarrely enough, these facts are important to the movie.
Throughout the movie we are reminded that time is ticking away and that Pitt will soon be executed - the scene would suddenly freeze, usually on Robert’s leathery face, and the shot turns into a black and white photo, and the time is dramatically stamped onto the screen. The first few times I thought this was a terrific way of building suspense that added a certain grit to the film, but after an hour or so it became distracting and after another hour it quite honestly just plain hokey.
And of course, because the film was made in Hollywood, there is a love story woven into the movie. Unfortunately, the writers, knowing that this was a spy movie and not a love story, didn’t bother developing that part of the story much. Or maybe they just assumed that they need only give us a hint of one, and we would all fall for it because we were watching two of the sexiest men to ever star in a movie.
And as for sexy, yes Brad certainly still has it-considering he’s in his thirties, I’d be really worried if he didn’t. But it is high time that we all give up on the idea that Robert Redford is still a sex symbol. Yes he was gorgeous when he was young, there is no denying that, but he has more wrinkles than a binder of API-601 readings has pages, and no amount of blond hair is going to change that.
Most of the plot is totally transparent-and, yes-I have ripped apart most of the movie. But all in all I have to say it was fun, and despite its predictability was actually quite suspenseful. So if you are in need of a mental break, I would definitely recommend Spy Games. Of course, if you want to keep your belief that Robert Redford is still sexy or that the CIA is a capable organization, this may not be the movie for you.
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