With Valentine?s Day fast approaching, it seems fair to ask whether a film will cut it as the all-important latter half of ?dinner and a movie.? And no, ?The Recruit? isn?t a film which will tug at your heart strings, force you to question your defiant stand against call-in radio shows or lead to deep gazes and clumsy groping/quoting at night?s end.
Rather, it has the potential to be a movie which everyone can sit down and lose themselves in — a blockbuster with cross-gender appeal.
For the ladies (and 10 percent of men) there is James Clayton (Colin Farrell, ?Tigerland?), a wise-cracking MIT graduate who, when not busy creating a cutting edge computer program, spends his time molding his body in the gym.
Cut from the same cloth as the Tom Cruise of ?Top Gun,? his independent streak and self-confidence are tarnished only by his inability to cope with the loss of his father.
And for the men (plus ditto the percentage of women) is Layla Moore (Bridget Moynahan, ?Coyote Ugly?), a driven woman who toes the line between being human and being the perfect recruit. Given a character more fleshed out by the pages of her CIA dossier than the script, Moynahan succeeds in looking good and providing a romantic foil for Clayton, but as action films seem to dictate, offers little more.
Brought together under the roof of CIA training facility ?The Farm? by agent Walter Burke (Al Pacino, ?Insomnia?), the first half of the movie is heavy on quips (Clayton?s round-about reference to Nintendo classic ?Duck Hunt? was a favorite) and offers the standard ?These are our cool toys and difficult training which allow us to become superhuman CIA agents? montage — a stubborn cliché in action movies, but still one which gets the juices flowing and prods the audience into pondering just how the cool toys and difficult training will be put to use.
Throughout, Burke remains behind the scenes, gazing intently into various monitors and appearing only to teach the occasional class or pit Clayton and Moore against one another. His actions (or lack thereof) seem benign enough, but he and the movie remain so perpetually in the shadows that Burke begins to seem almost like the wicked wizard behind the curtain.
And it may be the stark lighting, or the peculiar dead-pan musical score that runs the length of the film. Sinister synthesizers are as prevalant in tense scenes as they are in funny ones, leading to strained chuckles and the question, ?Was I really supposed to laugh??
It could be the sporadic and blunt foreshadowing, or the accelerating plot twists that seem more the symptom of a preening screenwriter than anything demanded by the story. But whatever the case may be, once Clayton and Moore leave ?The Farm? the movie falls apart.
The mystery does deepen with mention of a ?mole? in the CIA, and conflicting missions for the characters lead to some quick sex and some gunplay. But oddly enough, the final half-hour is spent in a non-chalant, ho-hum daze while the characters scurry around on the screen tying up recently presented loose ends.
By the time the mole is unearthed, an entirely unnecessary allusion to Clayton?s father is made and the credits roll, you quite frankly couldn?t care less.
?The Recruit? may not be the best of movies, and it may fall a bit short of the expectations it raises for itself in the first hour. But it can certainly be a slightly charged date movie, as Clayton gets half-naked, Moore takes a shampoo-commercial shower (less Herbal Essences, more ?fuzzy door makes for hazy curves?) and there is a car chase.
Just be sure that if you see it with a date, go somewhere you can drink in the theater, watch attentively for an hour until the booze hits, and then quietly grope one another as the movie unravels.
Would make for a solid Valentine?s Day, no?
Grade: B/C
