Have you ever had a secret fantasy that involves being an undercover agent — trying to figure out who the bad guys are, using secret tactics to get information out of people, getting into car chases and trailing people in a clandestine fashion?
You might be interested in “The Recruit,” in which a hapless Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate — Colin Farrell — gets actively recruited by an agent played by Al Pacino for the Central Intelligence Agency because of his hacking skills and his compatibility with a suspected double agent played by Bridget Moynihan.The premise might be a little bit implausible — I’m sure that it’s harder to get into the CIA than that — but if you can overlook that, the movie is really entertaining.
It’s one of those films with a lot of twists, where the protagonist comes out on top by doing a bunch of clever things. Of course, the bad guys are pretty clever too, and all of the trickery makes the movie fast-paced and fun to watch.
Another thing that makes “The Recruit” interesting is its portrayal of “The Farm,” the school where future CIA agents go to learn how to be spies. The students in the movie do some pretty cool things there, like learning how to trail someone in a crowd without being noticed, playing around with lie detectors, and learning special driving skills like how to block off a road with a car really quickly.
Unfortunately, the beginning of the film is weakened slightly by bad dialogue. The words sometimes sound fake, sticking out and distracting from the interesting situations. It’s not too much of a problem, though — by the middle and end of the movie, more action starts happening and the dialogue becomes less important than the car chases, including an awesome one where a Ford truck runs a Volkswagen Beetle off the road.
“The Recruit” is a fun movie full of ingenious little victories. If you’re not too critical of the premises of your movies, check it out.
Smith can be reached at ksmith@campustimes.org.
