Spy Game (2001)
Directed by Tony Scott
On the day of his retirement, a veteran CIA agent learns that his former protégé has been arrested in China, is sentenced to die the next morning in Beijing, and that the CIA is considering letting that happen to avoid an international scandal.
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22 films that influenced Spy Game
What critics say influenced Spy Game
It's not even in the ridiculously out-of-place imagistic Xerox of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders' melancholy ode to love and Berlin.
From "Top Gun" to "Days of Thunder" to "True Romance' (probably my favorite film by Scott) he has always displayed a sure hand in entertaining his demographic audience.
I will say that the end of the film brings into focus something that was tickling me throughout the whole film, and indeed can be found scattered throughout Tony Scott's entire filmography: while it's easy to look at that man's body of work, and conclude that he makes feature-length commercials for technology and machines, praising a metallic, dehumanised way of life (the three films that strike me as "quintessential" Scott, are Top Gun, Days of Thunder , and Crimson Tide; a movie about planes, cars, and a submarine, respectively, with only the last of these about its characters to any meaningful way at all), his films also tend to hinge on male relationships.
On the Tony Scott scale of high-gloss quality vs. high-gloss crapola, it ranks much closer to "Crimson Tide" than it does empty vessels of cinematic cool like "Enemy of the State," "Top Gun," "Days of Thunder," "The Fan" or "The Last Boy Scout."
(Scott, you may recall, directed "Days of Thunder" in Charlotte 11years ago, subsequently marrying a Lake Norman woman he met on that shoot.
More than a quarter-century ago, Redford played a young CIA employee in Three Days of the Condor.
Spy Game recalls Mr. Redford's terrific 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, in which he played another intelligence employee forced to turn his abilities against his own side.
In 1975's "Three Days of the Condor," Robert Redford played an idealistic, naive CIA agent who refused to come in from the cold.
I was reminded that Redford's earlier spy thriller, Sidney Pollack's “ Three Days of the Condor ” (1975) had at its heart his brief, sad relationship with Faye Dunaway ; it was interested in how they cared for one another, while “Spy Game's” Pitt/McCormack pairing is simply declared to exist.
Three Days of the Condor, also starring Redford, is one of my all-time favorite spy films, and I try to catch it every time it?s…
No stranger to the spy genre (he previously appeared in films such as "Three Days of the Condor" and "Sneakers"), Redford is best when plotting and pulling one (and then some) over on his superiors.
The story is, unexpectedly, Citizen Kane , transposed to the realm of high-level espionage.
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Love stories between heterosexual men, if you will, and while this is literalised and even parodied by something like the volleyball scene in Top Gun, it plays out in several of his movies in different ways: the quarrel ending in mutual respect in Crimson Tide, the slow transition from rivals to friends in Days of Thunder, the screwball romantic comedy structure of The Last Boy Scout , the Fatal Attraction -style obsession gone wrong in The Fan .
Pitt, of course, played something like a young Redford in Redford's best film as a director, the elegiac "A River Runs Through It," and that could have given "A Spy Game" a sense of baton-passing.
Although the two icons have not shared the screen before, Redford did direct Pitt in 1992's A River Runs Through It.
The similarity between Redford and Pitt was evident even when Redford directed the younger actor in "A River Runs Through It" a decade ago.
While it's also fun to see him paired with the man he made a star in his "A River Runs Through It," Redford and Pitt only appear together in flashbacks.
It's the presence of stars Robert Redford ("The Last Castle," "The Sting") and Brad Pitt ("The Mexican," "Snatch"), however, that clearly makes the film easy to watch (with the interesting parallel being that Redford also served as Pitt's mentor of sorts while directing him in "A River Runs Through It").
It�s just too bad to watch Marianne Jean-Baptiste, so exceptional in Secrets & Lies, underused again as Muir�s secretary.
Muir was clearly written for Redford, a pastiche of his quick-witted con man from "The Sting", his cool under pressure diamond thief in "The Hot Rock" and the patient, my-phone-is-my-weapon reporter from "All The President's Men".
For the mentor/protege dynamic, the casting couldn't be better: Watch "The Sting" and you'll see how much your young Robert Redford looks like your current Brad Pitt.
It's the presence of stars Robert Redford ("The Last Castle," "The Sting") and Brad Pitt ("The Mexican," "Snatch"), however, that clearly makes the film easy to watch (with the interesting parallel being that Redford also served as Pitt's mentor of sorts while directing him in "A River Runs Through It").
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When they're good, viable pictures such as "Crimson Tide" and "Enemy of the State" result; when they're indifferent, there's only so much that can be done to deal with how little of abiding interest is going on.
The debriefing flashbacks allow director Tony Scott, who has never made a smarter movie than this one, to employ the razzle-dazzle of his earlier films "Top Gun," "Crimson Tide" and the paranoid "Enemy of the State."
Spy Game (think Enemy of the State redux) showcases Scott’s signature panache for out-of-nowhere whoosh pans, excessive visual time stamps and brash location titles (you know, the ones accompanied by the sounds of a typewriter).
Director and DP worked very well together on Enemy of the State a few years back, and they do it again with Spy Game.
Directed by Tony Scott, whose credits include such military/government-related thrillers as Top Gun (1986), Crimson Tide (1995), and Enemy of the State (1998), Spy Game follows a similar formula, relating the ins and outs of international espionage while maintaining tension with the urgency of a ticking clock.
Tony Scott ("Top Gun", "Crimson Tide") does a fine job of building the suspense and then tightening the vice as the film goes on, but he's stuck in the same mode here as he was in 1998's decent but too-glossy "Enemy of The State".
The classy Charlotte Rampling ("Under the Sand") is used all too briefly as a counterspy.