The Recruit

01/17

Action-Thriller/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/115 minutes
Starring: Colin Farrell, Al Pacino, Bridget Moynahan
Director: Ronald Donaldson
Touchstone Pictures

James Clayton (the steamily unshaven Colin Farrell) is unlikely spy material. He is a part time bartender and a casually talented computer nerd who is in no rush to do anything with his life. However, CIA bigwig Walter Burke (the effortlessly convincing Al Pacino) knows talent when he sees it and draws Clayton into the Agency. Of course, any normal, balanced kid would have told the creepy Burke where to get off, but Clayton for all his laid-back way is damaged goods. His own father was Agency and died in the line of duty when Clayton was but a nipper. Going along with Burke is his way of getting closer to his long lost dad.

Extra incentive to hang in there through the CIA’s exacting training is provided by love-interest Layla (Bridget Moynahan). Naturally, Clayton finds himself in deeper than he ever anticipated when Burke uses him to expose a CIA mole and the unpleasant stuff hits the fan.

Burke’s wise aphorisms of survival for the recruits are: “trust no one”, and “nothing is as it seems”, which just happens to be a summary of the tight and twisting plot.

Al Pacino is his grizzled best, Colin Farrell fairly buzzes in this rehash of the veteran-rookie relationship, and the direction from Ronald Donaldson, known for Thirteen Days and No Way Out, is expert. Yet this is a film that doesn’t quite deliver what it promises. Leave your brain in ‘enjoy’ mode — and there is a lot to engage you in the acting and the action. However, at times the plot tests your credulity and common sense. If you start to think about it, it begins to unravel. Perhaps the plot suffers from twist overload.

The film is sold partly on its supposedly authentic insights into CIA recruitment and training at a facility known as The Farm, which provides some of the films compelling scenes. However, don’t forget Burke’s advice that nothing is what it seems: when asked about the film’s accuracy in depicting the recruiting and training the real-life CIA spokesman would neither confirm nor deny.

Once Upon a
Time in Mexico

COMING SOON

Action/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/103 minutes
Starring: Julio Bandero, Johnny Depp, Salma Hayek
Director: Robert Rodriguez
Columbia Pictures

Once Upon a Time in Mexico is to Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi series what The Good the Bad and the Ugly is to Sergio Leone’s Man with no Name trilogy of spaghetti westerns. Except that it’s not a western and the Leone film after which it was named, Once Upon a Time in the West, was not of the spaghetti-Eastwood trilogy. The title and parallel were suggested by Quentin Tarantino, so there’s no need for the idea to make any sense.

The point is that the first of this trilogy, El Mariachi, was an ultra-low budget ($7,000) cult success that made the name of the director and led on to increasingly ambitious and successful sequels. The second film in this series was Desperado; this is the third.

Rodriguez is keen to point out similarities to the Mad Max series for the same reasons of budget, style and commercial trajectory.
Rodriguez, who wrote, directed, filmed, edited, wrote the score — did everything but make the tea — is going for the quirky off-beat angle on action flicks — see above mentioned influences.

Julio Banderas is El Mariachi, a guitar-wielding, singing sort of action hero who is drawn out of self-imposed hermitage by the CIA to go after a typically noisome revolutionary/drug lord kind of bad guy. Of course, El Guitar Hero is in recluse mode in the first place because someone murdered his family, and of course the bad guy in the CIA mission is the very same murderer. Murder and revenge: now there’s a novel motor to a plot.

With a thoroughly pumped, thoroughly louche Johnny Depp playing the CIA agent (and just about stealing the show), Willem Dafoe in his most gravelly groove, the palpably exuberant direction of Rodriguez, and (sit down and take a deep breath) Mickey Rourke doing his own Chihuahua-cuddling Dr. Evil thing, you can’t go far wrong with this film.

So what if the expansive plot suffers from being compressed into an hour and half, it’s that much fun you really won’t notice the creaky bits until you’ve long left the cinema.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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