THE RECRUIT

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, January 31, 2003

THE RECRUIT is a thoroughly entertaining thriller that intelligently plays upon everybody's expectations of what really happens at the Farm, the CIA training facility in Langley, VA, where people embark on careers that they can never acknowledge. The script by Roger Towne and Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer comes up with a veritable grid of double-, triple- and possibly even quadruple-crosses while managing to keep the narrative straight enough for us to remain engaged and invested.

James Clayton (Colin Farrell) is a top-flight MIT grad who's flirting with the big computer companies when he's approached by a man who calls himself Walter Burke (Al Pacino). Not only does Burke paint a much livelier picture of the future for James if James will embark on the Company path, but there are hints that Burke knew James' father, a Shell Oil executive (or was he?) who died mysteriously in 1990. Intrigued, anxious to prove himself and not immune to the faint whiff of fatherly approval extended by Burke, James enters the CIA's boot camp for spies. The tests are major mind-messers although James manages to vividly turn the tables on a fellow recruit who has scammed him as part of an exercise but they're nothing compared to what happens when James exits training and is again recruited by Burke, this time to do some real work. Naturally, James and the audience are in for a few surprises...

One of

the surprises ultimately will be less than startling to followers of the genre simply because it's the sort of twist that's required, but even so, director Roger Donaldson gets a lot of mileage out of every bend. Even when we know what's happening, Donaldson shows it to us from a perspective we don't anticipate, right up through the final sequence. The script earns points for appropriate use of offbeat classic literature, with a Kurt Vonnegut concept prominent in the goings-on.

Farrell, playing the character who functions as true north for the viewer (we know he's for real when everything else is up for grabs), persuades on all levels we believe he's got the brains to be both a computer geek and a strategist who can go up against hardened pros, the guts to withstand some pretty hairy situations and the heart to be affected by it all, thereby allowing us to be affected as well. Bridget Moynahan as his fellow trainee is suitably alluring, tough and ambiguous, so that we can be properly hung up right along with James as to whether she's using him or she loves him. However, Pacino as the been-there, lied-about-that mentor/tormentor Burke pretty much commands the lion's share of focus whenever he's on. Sporting a folksy drawl and a nearly unflappable manner, Pacino is so cool and assured that he makes winding up like the man Burke presents himself to be seem like an end in itself he's the ultimate recruiting tool.

THE RECRUIT is the kind of spy movie that gives the genre a good name it's fast, smart, keeps us on our toes and even gets us to care about how it will all turn out.

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