Redford, Pitt sneak 'Spy Game' over its rough spots

Robert Redford's legendary good looks may be rapidly fading as he approaches his 65th year, but he still commands the screen nicely, and the uncanny prescience he's shown in picking timely subject matter -- as both a director and star -- is definitely holding up.

MOVIE REVIEW

SPY GAME

DIRECTOR: Tony Scott

CAST: Robert Redford, Brad Pitt

RUNNING TIME: 126 minutes

RATING: R for violence

WHERE: Grand Cinemas Alderwood, Kent 6, Metro, Cinema 17, Kirkland Parkplace, Oak Tree, Factoria, Montlake 9, Majestic Bay, Bellevue Galleria, Redmond Town Centre, Meridian 16, Crossroads, East Valley, Lewis & Clark, Issaquah 9, SeaTac North, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B-

Only last month, his surprisingly pro-military star vehicle, "The Last Castle," seemed to anticipate the post-Sept. 11 mood by celebrating honor, duty, country and leaving us with a stirring, full-screen image of a rippling American flag.

Now his second outing of the fall, "Spy Game," seems addressed to that other great legacy of our current national trauma: the realization that the CIA has declined in the post-Jimmy Carter era, and lost its ability to get down-and-dirty with the bad guys of the world.

Like "Castle," it's not completely successful as a thriller and lacks the cohesiveness and intelligence that Redford movies tend to have when he directs himself. But it's well-plotted, acted with a charismatic flair and right on the zeitgeist.

Redford plays Nathan Muir, a veteran CIA operative who, on the last day before his 1991 retirement, learns that a younger agent he recruited 15 years before (Brad Pitt) has been captured on a secret operation in Mainland China and is about to be summarily executed.


	KEITH HAMSHERE
Caught in mainland China and disowned by the CIA, agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) faces execution unless his longtime mentor can swing a rescue.

When it turns out the bureaucratic new CIA leaders intend to disavow the agent, and are out to get justifying evidence from Muir, he has to stall them, surreptitiously gather his own information and try to save his protégé on the other side of the world.

So the film consists of Muir sitting in a Langley, Va., conference room telling the story of his relationship with the younger man, as the movie flashes back to 1975 Vietnam, 1976 Berlin and 1985 Beirut to become a history of "The Company's" past quarter-century.

The director is Tony Scott ("Top Gun," "Crimson Tide") and the film bears all the hallmarks of his flashy, MTV style: Scenes are overdirected and overscored, and his camera can't stand still. He even uses a swerving helicopter to shoot a simple two-character dialogue scene.

It's also one of his more pretentiously arty endeavors, employing strange, attention-getting visuals that seem borrowed from "Requiem for a Dream," and experiments in color saturation (each flashback sequence has a different texture) that tend to get in the way of the story.

And he's even more sloppy than usual with his details: His Beirut shows obvious Moroccan landmarks; the hero, supposedly an expert on the Middle East, mispronounces the work "sheik"; and six years before the turnover, an opening title card tells us we're in "Hong Kong, China."

Still, Redford's wisecracky glibness is very appealing, his crusty star power holds the movie together, and his scenes with Pitt (his real-life protégé, who he directed in 1992's "A River Runs Through It") exude a comfortable macho camaraderie.

While it never glamorizes the spy game and goes out of its way to depict the CIA's assassinations and other sordid involvements over the years as being near-criminal acts, it does a shrewd job of vindicating its characters, and their necessity in an increasingly cruel world.

Reportedly, the film started out to be a more cynical and damning version of recent CIA history and American foreign policy. Before Sept. 11, Pitt was quoted as saying the script was about the "unintentional damage" the CIA has caused over the years "in the name of democracy."

But, edited after Sept. 11, "Spy Game" has turned out to be something very different: an ode to America's old-school cloak-and-dagger boys, who lived on professionalism and were not above terminating a big-league Arab terrorist before he tried to terminate us.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com