A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Recruit

Date Viewed: 2/2/03

Details:

Al Pacino

Colin Farrell

Bridget Moynahan

Director: Roger Donaldson

Score: +

The Review: Well-paced, tightly edited spy thriller: think of it as Training Day for the CIA. Pacino is the recruiter and trainer for the incoming class of proto-spooks; Farrell is the titular high-end recruit from the vaunted halls of academe, and Moynahan is one of his classmates and potential love interest. This is a substantially more gritty, more realistic, and certainly more believable view of the CIA's input sorting mechanism than Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. One of the advantages of having two movies with the same subplot in simultaneous release, is that it focuses the mind. Recruit is immensely more interesting, consistently better acted, and an all-round superior movie -- and Confessions pales by comparison.

Pacino and Farrell are excellent together, and remind me of the better aspects of the Redford and Pitt pairing in Spy Game (2001). The father-figure aspect is played hard as a recruiting tool, and there's a persistent back-story explaining why Farrell is so willing to buy into it. This is about the CIA and its people, so there are the inevitable twists and turns -- that goes without saying. Is it formulaic? To some extent. Does it work? Yes. Some formulas work for a reason; that's why they're formulas.

But this is not to say that all elements are equally believable. For example, there's a body of code at the core of the plot, about which I will say no more (long ago I promised "no spoiler warnings"). Even considering the verbose profundities of the worst of Ada (which this definitely was not), the source could not have ranged above 100 megabytes. This matters. And there are likely other safeguards in play that even a novice device driver writer would appreciate.

3-FEb-03

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