Recruit, The

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"Nothing is what it seems." And while that line from "The Recruit" is intended to tantalize, all it does is telegraph. What could (or should) have been a thriller turns out to be merely an exercise--both literally and figuratively. It's a cat-and-mouse movie with one felonious-minded feline and a group of clueless mice.

"The Recruit" takes us to a top-secret facility somewhere in Virginia (well, Ontario, if you're a scenic stickler), where would-be CIA agents are trained. It's a boot camp, basically, with chief spook and sadist-in-residence Walter Burke (Al Pacino) acting as drill instructor for a group of wet-behind-the-ears young'uns whom he soon pits against each other. Although we very quickly learn that everything is a test--everything is an exercise--it takes these recruits much longer to figure that out, which means, what? That the average viewer is more qualified to be a CIA agent than any of these people?

Well, thanks but no thanks. These guys play rough. Training like this makes you wonder who's the enemy . . . which, of course, is partly the point. It all begins innocently enough, with a "John, John, we're missing graduation!" moment as friends of James Clayton (Colin Farrell) phone to tell him he's late for their MIT presentation to Dell Computers at a job fair. They've come up with a program that can take over any host server, these überhackers, and the Dell people are thrilled. But there's a skulker who's also watching Clayton, and this guy Burke tries to convince him he's really CIA material. It's not a hard sell. Recruiting Clayton is as easy as trying to sell a Bowie knife to Rambo, because we understand rather early that he really wants to find out more about his father's death/disappearance, with all the signs pointing to CIA involvement. What better way to find out more about Dad than by signing up?

Not enough happens with that thread, really, until it's picked up much later. The main subplot involves a romantic tension between Clayton and fellow trainee Layla (Bridget Moynahan) and a competition between Clayton and a friend of hers who's a former Miami cop (Gabriel Macht) . . . but may be something more. Maybe some viewers will find this thrilling, but I kept thinking Samuel Morse the whole way, things were so obvious. Once you get past the first two acts, an entertaining enough account of their training travails, things bog down when they really should be pushing our brains to their outer limits and challenging us to figure it all out. Instead, it's not that much of a cipher. There's a mild twist at the end, but for the most part you can see everything coming as if you were atop the Empire State Building on a clear day, binoculars optional.

There's humor here too, from the intentional ("The CIA logo gets you laid. Republican girls? Hot!") to the unintentional, as when we see cars drive up to the George Bush Center for Intelligence and wonder, briefly, if that's an oxymoron.

As for the performances, you've got to hand it to Pacino and Farrell. They really seem to relish their roles, and that's the mark of not just a professional, but a person who loves his job. The rest of the cast is okay, but these two really go at it, as if it were an alpha male battle with a whole herd of females at stake. The thing is, nobody or nothing else rises to their level. Not the cinematography, not the set or sound design, and certainly not the script. As Farrell remarks in the commentary, it's a good screenplay, but not a brilliant one. Which leaves us with the action. For the first two thirds, it's all pretty basic . . . as in training. Put a bomb under a car, press the button on a remote, and watch it explode. There's a wrinkle (which I won't spoil), but it also doesn't pan out to be as exciting as the situation might have generated. And yet, like "Top Gun" or hell, even "Stripes," there's something about spending time with a bunch of recruits and watching them struggle to make it. Viewers vicariously put themselves in their place, wondering if they could do it. And the time that this film spends on training exercises and intrigues is at least time well spent. It's what happens in the third act that pushes "The Recruit" into the realm of "okayness." And believe me, the way this thing started out, it deserved a better fate.

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