Roger Donaldson’s The Recruit is a voluptuous Venus Flytrap of an espionage caper, complete with a monochromatic and appealing exterior of deceptive attractiveness, harboring more shards of twists than is perhaps warranted, wanted or needed, as most contemporary genre pictures sense is an obligation for their analytical existences. Strictly a bait-and-switch job with an abundance in the latter, though that’s not to say it isn’t performed surreptitiously or even unpredictably. That the cat & mouse exercise indulges in convoluted storytelling as part of its fanciful charm works for and against its better. Still it has the suavity and poise needed to merit its lighthearted invention and works marvelously as with the mechanical rudiments of its political surveillance/thriller genre. However, its anomalistic nature as disposable entertainment counteracts remembering much of its detail shortly after viewing.
Unconscious to the fact that he’s the new Dell Computers “Dude!” spokesman, MIT computer nerd (and moonlighting Cocktail lothario), James Clayton (Colin Farrell), probably has his future set with handsome employment from just about anyone when he and his friends write an intrinsically-invading manipulative computer program for a computer fair. Exposition describing the loss of his father at a young age, perhaps during a mysterious reconnaissance CIA mission, prompts Clayton to accept a shadowy Walter Burke (Al Pacino) as surrogate father and his rather unappealing offer of a CIA position. Clayton meets competitive and enigmatic Layla Moore (Bridget Moynahan) at the CIA’s secluded “Farm” training facility, who inevitably embodies ice queen, love interest, femme fatale, and distressed damsel, in nearly that order. When Clayton supposedly washes out of the Farm’s training session he becomes Burke’s covert protégé and begins to infiltrate the CIA headquarters, studying who he believes is a mole.
As insouciant fare this conforms to the prerequisites of Hollywood Old-Hat with a kind of witlessness attributed to the dismal cadaver that continues to heave and roll known as Hollywood. It’s flavorless but appeasing; an ornate Tony Scott byproduct akin to the tradition of a pre-existing film playing on the television, slightly muffled over the soundtrack’s background mutter, during a better film, but not much better. Thus, The Recruit embodies impassive creation in a convention of nondescript über-thriller, packaged with frilly post-modernisms and breezy aloofness, whose counterparts equal in performance, further perpetuating Hollywood stock-and-trade. For one interchangeable element of a film is another borrowed, and from there it goes on and on.
Pacino’s performance, announced by the poster as only second to Farrell’s eye-brow mocking of Dwayne Johnson, is considerably less in terms of his booming curmudgeon image of late and can be pretty accurately described as a “phone-in.” But then again it lightens the exhausted affair to that of a crinkled eye-winking, and a few vivacious lines add to the film’s scorecard previously negated by incorrigible formula and product placement. This is undemanding, rousing adventure cinema at its epitome. Anything slightly challenging and provocative is much more worthy of seeking out but this doesn’t stray from the effectual, apathetic thrillers that audiences have grown to adore and feel with glowing rapport. Contradictory to this review’s dominating tones I must say I found the tumultuous conspiracy odyssey a satisfying one, as sort of a whirling techno opera for the paranoid and jaded, masquerading as something of a precocious crowd-pleaser.