When it comes to odd filmmaking gifts that shouldn’t work but strangely do, surely it’s Tony Scott’s bizarre talent to take dramatic, mature moments and shoot and edit them like he’s still making Top Gun. For example, you wouldn’t think that anyone would willingly choose to approach a nostalgic spy thriller featuring genuine Hollywood royalty and drop in crash zooms, jump cuts and various other flashy tricks. But then, Tony Scott wasn’t just anyone.
While others may think to approach the underrated Spy Game with a slow, deliberately style that echoed the stealthy operations and tricksy office politics of the CIA, Scott simply rolled up his sleeves and poured out the similar, twitchy, glitchy tone he used for his Bruckheimer funded paranoia thriller, Enemy Of The State, which is actually quite weird when you figure that the stoic form of Robert Redford is at the helm. But cast alongside the man who had been repeatedly dubbed as his natural successor, could cinema’s golden crusader for truth mesh with Scott’s frenetic style?
Political matters in Hong Kong are instantly soured when a CIA agent is caught in the midst of an audacious act of trying to bust a political prisoner out of the deepest, darkest hole of a People Liberation Army prison located in Suzhou. However, things get even more thorny when it’s discovered that the captured agent, Tom Bishop, was actually working on an unsanctioned mission and will be executed in 24 hours if the CIA doesn’t make some sort of deal. Worse yet, this has occurred in 1991 where the U.S A. and China are close to a major trade agreement and a visit by the president.
The powers that be summon Nathan Muir, a veteran case officer who used to be Bishop’s mentor and handler after recruiting him in Vietnam back in 1975 who is literally working out his final day before retirement in order to give them the info on this rogue agent. However, Muir is about as savvy as they come and as he simultaneously tells them what they need to know while keeping more sensitive details from them, he enters something of a high-wire balancing act as he doles out Bishop’s life story from one corner of his mouth while trying to gum up the gears of international politics with the other. However, the deeper we get into Bishop’s past, the more we discover how tough it was for even Muir’s mercilessly pragmatic teachings to fully deconstruct that idealistic streak and soon we discover who it was that Tom risked his life to save from that Chinese hell hole and how much it went against what rules were drummed into his head.
With love a contributing factor to this disaster, will Muir listen to his own, admittedly wise, head to determine how to proceed, or will his heart lead him towards trying to tie the CIA in knots for an old friend?
It’s always easy to underestimate Tony Scott mainly because he probably liked to use more flash fire edits per scene than even Michael Bay; however what everyone always seems to forget is that even though he went heavy on the old visual razzle dazzle, Scott was also pretty damn good at handling plot and story while he was busy flash frying your retinas. As if expertly wrangling Quentin Tarantino’s words in True Romance and siccing Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman on one another in Crimson Tide wasn’t enough proof enough that the director knew how to add gravitas to the flare, then the dense, flashback riddled world of Spy Game should certainly seal that deal. It helps that you have an old hand like Redford who can tell pages of story with a mere glance, but it’s actually amazing how much this movie is slept on when you consider that it’s not only a cracking spy flick, but it also seems to be something of an ode to thrillers past.
However, first on the agenda is undoubtedly the casting which sees Redford share the screen with Brad Pitt, an actor who had long since been hailed as having many similar virtues to the veteran performer both in looks and presence. The fact that a sizable bulk of the film involves the elder statesman teaching the young buck the shady ropes of international intrigue feels almost like a meta jackpot, especially when it’s Redford acting as the grizzled realist when he spent his earlier years fighting for truth and justice. Actually, in many ways, while Pitt’s inclusion brings the sizzle, it’s very much Redford who provides the steak and the majority of the plot us spent alternating between flashbacks of him recruiting and guiding Pitt and watching him try and pull some seat of his pants Keyser Soze shit as he tries to gaslight his superiors and try to aid his protégé from behind his desk as his retirement hour looms.
Obviously, Redford kills it as the elder statesman who fascinatingly bamboozles his bosses and utters lines like “We needed twice the sex with half the foreplay” like they’re perfectly normal things to say, but you can’t rule out Pitt, who despite mostly being relegated to copious flashbacks, manages to get enough of that boy scout charm across to help cement that platonic bromance never actually meeting in the “present” day.
Another cool notion is that Spy Game seems to use its flashbacks to evoke spy cinema from days past. The Vietnam stuff all feels very Watergate, with a sniping mission that may cause Call Of Duty fans to sit up and take notice, but a more clandestine period set in East Germany, with wet cobbles and tense run-ins conjure up memories of films like The Third Man before Scott later gets a chance to blow shit up good when the flashbacks move to a ravaged Beruit in 1985. But while he juggles all this, it’s worth noting that Spy Game manages to tell a very human, down to earth story on multiple levels while still indulging in the sort of in-camera pizzazz that originally made his name. The character stuff is as solid as they come and at times it feels like a far more mature and sober progression of the more entertainingly paranoid swings of the Gene Hackman/Will Smith double act from Enemy Of The State. You can also tell that Scott’s greatly enjoying delivering spy stuff bereft of fancy gadgets and thingamajigs and embracing Muir’s mantra that most of the time all an operative needs is a stick of gum, a pocket knife and a smile. Although considering both Pitt and Redford are particularly famous for their respective, megawatt beams, maybe relying on a smile isn’t quite so minimalist after all – Hell, a cheeky smirk from either one of those handsome devils is probably enough to take out half an aggressive nation on its own.
Delivering a more mature narrative than his hyped up editing may suggest, it’s a real shame that Spy Game has remained a Tony Scott film that’s remain as successfully under the radar as its profoundly sneaky characters. But if you’re in the mood for a movie that indulges in both office-based and in-the-field subterfuge (not to mention a Hollywood team-up for the ages) then this is definitely a game you should be playing.
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