Spy Game

Directed by Tony Scott, Spy Game follows veteran CIA case officer Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) as he endeavors to free his protégé (Brad Pitt’s Tom Bishop) from captivity. Filmmaker Scott, armed with a script by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata, delivers a periodically passable yet mostly tiresome thriller that contains few elements designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest, as the movie has been suffused with an often egregiously complicated narrative that perpetuates the arms-length atmosphere – with the inscrutable (and mostly uninvolving) plot slowly-but-surely rendering the picture’s positive attributes moot. And while Scott has admittedly punctuated the proceedings with a small handful of compelling sequences, including (and especially) a terrific scene detailing a rooftop argument between Nathan and Tom, Spy Game primarily comes off as a convoluted misfire that squanders the predictably compelling and charismatic efforts of its two megawatt stars.

** out of ****