Spy Game (2001)

Synopsis

Spy Game poses plenty of questions from the first few, tense moments. Who is this team infiltrating a prison? And what – or who, as it turns out – are they after? One thing you do know. When they’re caught just feet from escaping, it’s not going to go well for them in the morning.

And the next morning it’s not going well for Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) either as he sets out on his last day at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He learns his protégé, Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt), has been captured in a unauthorized op at a Chinese prison. When summoned to a briefing to fill in colleagues about Bishop, Muir confesses he hasn’t seen Bishop lately and is just as foggy about his intentions as they are. They question Muir about some of his and Bishop’s past escapades together, and Muir begins to develop the uneasy theory that they’re not trying to find ways to free Bishop, but to justify giving him up, lest it derail a long-planned diplomatic mission happening soon.

During the briefing, Muir’s recollections of Bishop play out in flashbacks: Muir meeting Bishop as a young sniper in Vietnam, recruiting Bishop, training Bishop, and lecturing Bishop on the hard facts of the moral desert their profession lives in. And finally, we learn how Bishop meets and falls for the woman he was trying to rescue, British activist Elizabeth Hadley (Catherine McCormack).

And during his training we hear Muir’s important advice that Bishop seems to have disregarded: “Don’t ever risk your life for an asset. If it comes down to you or them … send flowers.”

And that’s advice Muir disregards as well.

See It

What a joy to watch Robert Redford so effortlessly play the role of the veteran CIA operative who is staying one move ahead of the colleagues who are trying so hard to keep him contained. We hear his phone calls to contacts, his instructions to his cagey assistant Gladys Jennip (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), his deflected answers to his interrogator’s questions. We see the chess pieces he’s arrayed, but not always how they’re working together, and it’s thrilling to watch as Muir outmaneuvers everyone and delivers a checkmate no one saw coming … at least not his colleagues.

Brad Pitt is a perfect foil for Redford, playing the young, skeptical, conflicted sniper-turned-CIA-assassin against Redford’s self-assured mentor. Pitt keeps you guessing at key junctures when you see his better intentions fighting against the orders he’s obligated to dispassionately execute.

The pace is quick, the action pieces are well choreographed, and even the talky scenes breeze by. In the end, Spy Game sets out to be nothing more than a satisfying tale of spies who stick together, even when they shouldn’t, and on that it delivers.