Spy Game
Spy Game | |
| Director: | Tony Scott |
| Cast: | Robert Redford, Brad Pitt |
| Genre: | Film, Drama |
How does Hollywood happen to have so many jingoistic movies ready to cash in on this time of crisis? Robert Redford's second right-wing tract in as many months features him as Nathan Muir, a CIA agent who has postponed his retirement to save Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt), an assassin he trained who's now imprisoned in China. As Muir reviews Bishop's operations history with a panel of superiors who want to leave Bishop for dead, he secretly takes matters into his own hands. Director Tony "Ridley's Little Brother" Scott and cinematographer Daniel Mindel revisit their Enemy of the State with gratuitous visual flair and a numbingly manipulative musical score, but viewers daring to think will find themselves set on suspect political ground. By rooting for Redford and Pitt, Spy Game makes the viewer complicit in a glut of flashback CIA atrocities, from Vietnam in the '60s through Lebanon in the '80s. At least the film does answer one question definitively: How did Secrets and Lies' remarkable Marianne Jean-Baptiste go from an Oscar nomination in 1996 to 15 minutes of screen time as a secretary in 2001? Answer: by being a black woman in Hollywood.