It's not
easy working for the CIA. They ship you to The Farm, an isolated
place for training, and then put you through hell. You get
no riches, no praise, and no glory. And if you fail, maybe
you haven't really, because it's part of a great and terrible
game of espionage where you might be more valuable for what
you don't know than what you do.
But of
course, we can neither confirm or deny if that's true.
In Roger
Donaldson's The Recruit, Colin Farrell has the title
role as computer whiz kid Jack Clayton, sucked into life with
The Agency by instructor Walter Burke (Al Pacino). Clayton's
father disappeared under mysterious circumstances years before,
and Burke may know something about it. But whether or not
Clayton's will to succeed comes from misplaced daddy issues,
he's clearly got what it takes to be a master spy, or at least
the Hollywood version of one.
As should
be expected, training is harsh, Pacino is harsher, and everybody
learns to be not what they seem. Because this is a movie,
the subtle sparks of love start flying between Clayton and
fellow recruit Layla (Bridget Moynahan), though both the audience
and Clayton have to have some issues with how real that love
is.
To explain
much of the plot would be to ruin the twists and turns of
Roger Towne and Kurt Wimmer's script. Suffice to say that
some will find it predictable in its unpredictability, but
there's still a nice edge to how off-balance circumstances
push Clayton. Ten years ago, The Recruit might have
surprised us, but now the plot complications have become routine.
The film
also makes clear that it would utterly suck to live in the
nearby Virginia town, because The Farm's mindgames keep spilling
over into that landscape. There's no way that ordinary citizens
don't get involved …unless they're in on it, too.
Because
the characters are training to hide their true personalities,
almost no one ends up having much of one. Most of the senior
CIA trainers and agents are interchangeable, except, of course,
for the outsized Pacino.
If anything,
he has too much of a personality, and it's one we've seen
from him before. Only the slipping soft southern accent gives
us the sense that he's not exactly the same guy who coached
Jamie Foxx to a Super Bowl victory, or taught Chris O'Donnell
what it means to be a man. He even gets a few good ranting
monologues in, on the outside chance Oscar voters might be
watching.
Holding his own against Pacino is Farrell, possibly the luckiest
actor so far of the 21st Century. He's had a pretty amazing
career in less than two years. Clearly an actor with "it," Farrell
has bounced from movie to movie making an impression in supporting
roles, never quite breaking through.
But if
the movies have failed, they've been chalked up to his co-stars.
(Except for American Outlaws, which no one wants to
even admit was on the board.) Always, he gets another chance,
and in the next month, we'll see him in two more films.
Once again,
Farrell burns with intensity, grabbing our attention with
an energy that makes the material seem better than it is.
I'll
admit I took my mother to this film and afterward, all she
could say was "who was that young man? He was gorgeous."
People may not remember his name yet, and The Recruit
may not change that, but it's coming. Soon. After all, he's
now got the retired women on his side.
Where
the script holds our interest is in the scenes of CIA training
and in a couple of good macguffins. Being a technical whiz,
Clayton has created a program that can hijack computer network
monitors, maybe not as cool as observers from Dell make it
seem at the MIT job fair, but still a real world application
of some scary note. And it's not the big one - no, the government
has developed something called "Ice-9," just the sort of name
the government would crib from Vonnegut to make them seem
vaguely counterculture.
Capable
of destroying a nation's computer networks from an electrical
outlet, Ice-9 may or may not exist (that's up to you to decide,
ultimately), but in either case, it's what everybody wants.
So pseudo-savvy
does the script seem, that it's a shame it doesn't make provisions
for the CIA to defend against USB ports. But oh, well. Better
films have committed worse techno-crimes.
It's
definitely a cut above a direct-to-video thriller, and for
this time of year, The Recruit is fairly diverting.
It holds more of a promise of better things to come from Colin
Farrell than working well in and of itself. Or maybe that's
just what they want you to think…
