The Recruit
Stop me if you’ve heard this before but in the shadowy world of espionage nothing is what it seems. What? That’s not entirely news to you? Well, let me repeat myself: Nothing is what it seems!
If you think that’s not clear enough then the first 20 minutes of The Recruit (Cert 12A) should just about be enough to drive the message home. Spy-genre action thrillers have, traditionally, trod one of two paths: A. They’ve placed an ‘ordinary’ man in the middle of an extraordinary situation and then hooked the viewer as he struggled to extricate himself (The Parallax View) or B. They’ve taken an extraordinary man and allowed him to become entangled in an unravelling web of events (Clear And Present Danger, Enemy Of The State).
Thanks to the events of 9/11 Roger Donaldson’s latest offering treads a delicate path between the two. The CIA’s constant battle against an unseen enemy here takes on an added urgency that’s reinforced by the unstated understanding that the odds are very high indeed. In view of this the fact that the enemy may be within as well as without helps to give a twist to the plot that for the first two thirds of the film it helps to crank up the tension to almost unbearable levels.
That exactly is also its downfall. With only so many predictable convolutions available to any plot before it either loses its audience or runs out of steam The Recruit begins, in its final 40 minutes, to wind down towards predictability.
What saves it from being a turkey is the fact that Colin Farrell and Al Pacino turn on star-wattage in just about every frame, managing to create a performance that’s mesmerising when the going’s good and film-saving when the steam begins to fizz a little.
Matched by the intensity brought to the screen by love-interest Bridget Moynahan the end result, perhaps surprisingly, is a slickly produced, edge-of-the-seat production that’s disappointing towards the end only because what’s preceded it has been so good.
Every film, of course, stands or falls on the £5 question: is it worth the money? Now, we’re set for a year where the Incredible Hulk, X-Men 2, Spiderman 2, Kill Bill, The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions not to mention the third and final instalment of Lord Of The Rings, are about to fill the silver screen with so much awe-inspiring, mind-blowing, gut-twisting, finger-clenching, edge-of-the-seat-clawing eye-candy that it may just be nice to be able to seat back and enjoy a film that’s good without being great. Enjoyable without it being obsessive. And The Recruit is indeed that and nothing more.
