"The Recruit" review

The Recruit (2003)

Directed by Roger Donaldson
Writing credits Roger Towne Kurt Wimmer

Al Pacino .... Walter Burke
Colin Farrell .... James Douglas Clayton
Bridget Moynahan .... Layla Moore
Gabriel Macht .... Zack

Talk about blowing it. Here you have a subject matter, CIA Training, which holds a lot of possibilities for a cool movie. But every part of this flick was as generic and dull as you could get. Technically it's not a bad movie. There is nothing wrong with the way it's made. The problem is in the story itself. It's just not interesting enough.

There are two parts to this flick. The first part is the CIA Training for the recruit. So they're going through the motions on the Farm. But every part of the training is dull and lifeless. Nothing was specific to the CIA. They could have just as well have been training at the FBI, NSA, or any other government acronym. Where was the cool spy stuff? How about how to assassinate someone? Or how to plant a car bomb? Or how to buy off a warlord in Afghanistan? Couldn't this flick have been a little timelier? We've seen people practice breaking into a house before.

This leads to part two of the flick. So the recruit "graduates". What assignment do they put him on? Follow the pretty girl! Wow. This movie went out of its way to be lame. Couldn't they have sent him to the Middle East or Afghanistan? The movie devolves into the standard double agent has got the code/disk/microfilm and someone else has got to get it from them.

Wasted opportunity. It should have been cool but it wasn't.

SCORE: 1.5 out of 4 recruits on the job