K-SCORE: 84
Director: Tony Scott
“It’s worth rewatching considering most other films of it’s ilk should only be used as lullaby substitutes for unrestful ten-year-olds.”
Writer: Michael Frost Beckner
Starring: Robert Redford, Brad Pitt
Spoiler Level: Minor
Spy Game is pure espionage blended with 90s iconography. Graham is a huge fan. By his own admission, he likes spy thrillers more than most people. Apparently he watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy without getting bored. Next he’ll be saying he sat through The Good Shepherd without dozing off or shooting himself in the head. The Good Shepherd… I think a piece of me is still watching that film, doomed to be stuck in the dull world between sleeping and waking for all eternity...
Ehem. Spy Game is far better than those films and most in its genre. The film impressively tackles the task of unfolding an entire backstory for Bishop (Pitt) and Muir (Redford) while a high-stakes international life or death problem lingers in the foreground. The script is very tight and it has to be. You don’t have a lot of time to get to know these characters, locations, conflicts, and histories. So that you get all of that and Redford outwits all the others at his agency with clever tricks about his retirement, operation Dinner Out, and his ex-wives is all really satisfying. The fact that Muir spends the whole film in the same building is also great.
I think most films would be tempted to deviate so they could have more explosive action-centric conclusions. Spy Game stays on target, forcing you to remember details so that the 'what-happened' of the espionage makes sense. The character motivations are pretty cheesy and obvious - one agent motivated by love of a beautiful woman and another motivated by his loyalty to those who worked for him. But they function.
It’s structure and the chains that bind the elements are Spy Game’s strengths, but it definitely comes peppered with cliches. They’re wearing aviator sunglasses everywhere; they keep having arguments about separating the good guys from the bad guys; they’re talking about playing with people’s lives; the film has slow-mo shots of characters gazing into the distance at sunset; we get helicopters in the night, children swarming the girl who’s in a foreign nation to help their poverty despite the violence, dialogue about not knowing their real names and birthdays, an excessively loyal black secretary, a coworker who won/lost a bet on “the big game last night” and so on. I didn’t really mind though. As long as the story works, you can fill it with cliches up to a point, and all of that adds to the film’s 90’s character. I still have Brad Pitt’s line, “Don’t tell me that! You didn’t look in his eyes!” stuck in my head.
No, my issue is that I don’t have enough time in a two hour movie to really get to know these complex international conflicts and career spies who have to deal with them. The tricks for freeing Bishop from the Chinese prison work, and I felt I understood that conflict well, but I didn’t have nearly enough time to appreciate the complexity of the backstory locales, terrorists, and war zones. So Spy Game thereby doesn’t escape my complaint with the genre. If I’m going to dedicate my time to an espionage story, to understanding the foreign affairs issue and the intricate lives of the characters grappling with those issues, then I really want to dive in. I can’t appreciate them properly when they all happen so quickly.
Spy Game is rare though. It’s worth rewatching considering most other films of it’s ilk should only be used as lullaby substitutes for unrestful ten-year-olds. Maybe I should have had Graham write a review though. He’s pretty sure Spy Game sits on a pedestal of greatness so lofty most films can’t even see it up there.