SPY GAME

Not to speak ill of the dead but the director of this espionage thriller is Tony Scott, and his aesthetic has never appealed to me much.

The opening set-piece is a case in point.  Brad Pitt is trying to extract someone from a Chinese prison, and it ought to be exciting and suspenseful, but thanks to the editing and visual style it did nothing except irritate me.

Pitt is playing Bishop, an ex-CIA operative who used to be handled by Muir, played by Robert Redford.  Bishop is captured by the Chinese and (rather absurdly) is going to be executed in exactly 24 hours time.  

So we have a very contrived race against the clock  - can Muir save Bishop?

What ensues is a battle of wits between Muir and his bosses who don't seem that bothered by Bishop's fate, interrupted by flashbacks tracing the history of Muir's relationship with Bishop.

The first flashback, in Vietnam, is dull in the extreme.

The second flashback, in Berlin, is a bit better, in terms of the story and the visual style.  It's also enlivened by an all-too-brief cameo by Charlotte Rampling. 

The longest and best flashback is to a CIA mission in Lebanon, during which Bishop becomes romantically involved with a relief worker Elizabeth Hadley, well played by Catherine McCormack.  Unfortunately she is not quite as innocent as she appears, Muir interferes, the mission goes south, and in the fallout Bishop walks out on Muir and the CIA.  Muir then hands over Hadley to the Chinese, who have some history with her.

In the present it is Hadley who Bishop has tried to rescue from the prison.

There's some fun in seeing Muir outwit everyone in order to secure an unbelievable rescue of both Bishop and Hadley, meaning that we get the obligatory feel-good ending.

But it's all pretty empty and pointless. The dramatic heart of the film should be the relationship between Bishop, Muir and Hadley, but nobody making this film is much interested in that. 

RATING: x Find Something Better To Do