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Spy Game

Release Date: 
11/21/2001
MPAA Rating: 
MPAA: R
Star Rating: 
★★★★
Spy Game is just a cool movie. We don’t know how else to really sell it. Directed by Tony “Top Gun/Days of Thunder/Ridley’s Baby Brother” Scott and starring Brad Pitt and Robert Redford (the CIA equivalent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundamaged Kid), Spy Game is a gritty take on the espionage genre that will please fans who like their spies to have more than just cool gadgets.

When a rogue operative (Pitt) gets arrested in China, the CIA calls in his mentor (Redford) to help figure out what happened and why. Their relationship is developed through flashbacks beginning with Vietnam and ending with ’80s Beirut, where Pitt’s character begins a dangerous affair with a beautiful aid worker played by Catherine McCormack (wouldn’t you?). While the flashbacks are unintentionally funny (They try to glue cheap sideburns onto Redford and pass him off as “younger”—fat chance, since this guy’s face looks like it was molded out of concrete and driven over several thousand times), Spy Game is Redford’s show, and he’s excellent. Proving that espionage is nothing more than an elaborate way of fucking with people’s heads, the movie’s best moments feature Redford subtly using details and “found” bits of info to screw with enemies, friends, and—most satisfyingly—his superiors. It proves that a good eye beats a remote-controlled Aston Martin any day of the week.