The Recruit
I wasn't sure how to start this review, and so I went and read a few others to see what language was being used to describe it elsewhere, and was a little surprised to find that the movie had been met in the critical press by a mixture of loathing and contempt. I thought I'd add my dissenting voice to the noise.
Rotten Tomatoes has a freshness rating of 37% on this movie. This is awful, and would normally indicate that it didn’t deserve to be made at all. I find this hard to understand, because while it certainly doesn’t deserve much in the way of accolades, there is little to actively dislike about the movie, it is not overly simple, it is not riddled with clichéd one-liners, it is not badly filmed and it doesn’t bore the audience. Why all the horrible dislike? I’ll get to my thoughts on that later – but first the film.
James Clayton (Colin Farrell)is an exceptionally bright MIT graduate, tormented by the disappearance of his father in a plane crash years before, who is recruited by Walter Burke (Al Pacino) to work as a CIA operative. After a brief courtship, James finds himself in "The Farm", the CIA training grounds, where he meets Layla (Bridget Moynahan). Both during and after his training, James learns that in the world of spooks, nothing is as it seems. Surprisingly, no matter how many times he learns this, he always seems to have to learn it again.
I can’t say much more without giving away key plot points. The script seeks to create a level of complexity that gets dramatically unwound at the end, and only partially succeeds, because the dénouement is a little forced, and the set-up gives too much away, such that it is possible to put the pieces together long before the dramatic ending does so for you.
As I said above, I am a little confused as to why so many critics heaped scorn upon this movie. It is entertaining and watchable, and while certainly no masterpiece, it has none of the awful dialogue of Attack of the Clones (63% on RottenTomatoes) or the blatant free-riding on past successes of the latest instalment of Bond (57% on RottenTomatoes). When comparing this movie to others that have recently been released, I was relieved to find at least some original work not collapsing under the weight of a hundred clichés. It is true that it does not have the flair of Spy Game and that it is much weaker in terms of grittiness than Training Day, but to say it was a weak parody of both, as Sean Burns does in the Philadelphia Weekly, is to be a little too harsh.
Perhaps the fairest criticism of this movie is that it is carried by the performance of its two main actors rather than the strength of the script or the talent of the director and crew. Reading the reviews, my favourite criticism disguised as a compliment comes from the Amazing Colossal Website, where the review states that the pace of the film prevents the idiocies of the plot from sinking in before the credits have rolled.
The Recruit page at the Internet Movie Database
Touchstone Pictures’ official "The Recruit" website
Trailers from Apple.com
Posted by nlvp at February 2, 2003 05:56 PM