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The Recruit

During the holiday movie season I was treated to multiple viewings of the trailer for "The Recruit," Roger Donaldson's latest exercise; in one showing, I remember a friend remarking, "We've pretty much seen the entire movie in two minutes flat." Now having seen the real deal, I wholeheartedly agree. Thanks to Touchstone's extremely revealing advertising campaign, we're left with a movie that doesn't seem nearly as smart or as slippery as it thinks it is, and for a number of reasons primarily related to a lack of originality and plot twists that feel more like cop-outs than genuine surprises. As a testament to the ills of movie marketing techniques, the film is memorable; as a thriller, it's shaky foundation and lack of intrigue weigh it down immensely. ***

The film stars Hollywood's spotlight bad boy Irishman Colin Farrell as James Clayton, who finds himself in an unexpected position when he is approached by Central Intelligence Agency recruiter Walter Burke (Al Pacino), who finds Clayton's computer abilities and smarts to be of valuable interest to the agency. At first hesitant, Clayton soon takes the bait when he learns that Burke may have information about his deceased father, who died in a plane crash in Peru in 1990. This will later be used in a number of the film's ill-conceived plot twists, as well as the hammy feel-good final shot, which feels calculated right down to the last frame. ***

Getting back on track now, Clayton soon arrives with many other operative-hopefuls at The Farm, a secret C.I.A. training facility where the recruits are put through every situation imaginable. "Nothing is what it seems," touts Burke, who later makes an example of Clayton by pairing him up with fellow recruit Layla (Bridget Moynahan), and then proceeding to place him in a set-up in which he is led to believe that she is in danger, after which he breaks and reveals names to fake villains. Surprise, surprise, though: he passed the test. He's now a full-fledged operative, or is he? And his latest mission- to follow Layla, who is actually a double agent working for another unnamed rival- is it real, or just another test? And is Burke really working with the best intentions in mind? ***

This much we've already taste-tested from the previews, but sometimes a morsel is all you need to get a feel for a comfortable food. "The Recruit," however, is far from anything comfortable or entertaining: structured in such a way that it plods and scrapes when it should zip and zing, the film never really picks up and viable tension, mostly because the twists are seen coming from a mile away, and as such, there's really no reason to become involved with the events at hand. Whether or not filmgoers who were not privy to the trailer will see it in a different light is not for me to say; all I can attest to here is the fact that the studio made a major mistake of giving away too much too fast, thus rendering the film impotent of any real energy. ***

This personal baggage aside, "The Recruit" also suffers from a severe lack of originality and an inability to make the old feel new, or at least alive. The generic is-she-or-isn't-she finger-pointing concerning the real intentions of Moynahan's character quickly grows tiresome and predictable, and soon it becomes a question of when her innocence will be unveiled. And thriller upon thriller upon thriller has used the old reversal twist to bring to an end a series of seemingly disconnected subplots, but here the writers seem to have trouble giving us something solid, something that makes the previous moments worthwhile (novices, read no further). All we are left with is a hammy send-up of the Dennis Hopper character's terrorist motivations from "Speed," which isn't very appealing, nor is it very coherent. In this field, "The Recruit" has nothing new to show for itself, and in the wake of films like "Clear and Present Danger" and "Spy Game," it pales severely. ***

And then we have Al Pacino, whose strikingly different performance in last year's "Insomnia" seems light years away from the generic brand of dialogue delivery and self-awareness that he projects in his efforts as Walter Burke. Farrell does sizeably well in the film's later moments, evoking a cool sense of disorientation and confusion even as the film becomes increasingly routine. Moynahan, as the potential suspect, isn't given much more to do other than look suspicious and glance around warily. Couple all of this with the redundancy of the overall combination of the film's elements, and you have an exercise in tedium that continues its downward spiral right to the end. The film's tagline reads, "In the C.I.A., nothing is what it seems." In "The Recruit," everything is what it seems.

The rear cover of the DVD informs us that "The Recruit" is being presented in "the director's original 1.77:1 aspect ratio [which] shows more of the film than was presented in theaters." How completely useless! Why not just present it in full-freakin'-frame, for God's sake? What is presented here looks very good, though: edges are sharp with very minor enhancement halos that do not intrude; color saturation and accuracy is very nice, with no artifacts or smearing; and contrast and shadow detail look great. It's a clean presentation, but for whatever reason, the studio decided to reframe and restructure, and there's really no viable reason why, except stupidity. ***

The sound, however, is much better. Mastered in Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS 5.1 audio, both deliver excellent results. Unlike most thrillers, this one doesn't rely primarily on sudden jolts on the soundtrack and lots of big, bombastic sound effects to get us through the movie; instead, its attempts to build suspense through well-recorded music and a nicely-mastered low end. The score has a great ambient presence in the surrounds with some excellent connectivity to the front end, while the .1 LFE keeps things rumbling throughout, if only slightly in places. The more frenetic moments reach aggressive levels, and the results are quite good. Dialogue sounds natural, and front channel separation is well-done. The DTS is more clearly defined in terms of spatiality and dynamic range, but both options perform just fine.