The Recruit (film)
The Recruit | |
---|---|
Directed by | Roger Donaldson |
Written by |
|
Produced by |
|
Starring | |
Cinematography | Stuart Dryburgh |
Edited by | David Rosenbloom |
Music by | Klaus Badelt |
Production companies |
|
Distributed by | Buena Vista Pictures Distribution |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 115 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $46 million[1] |
Box office | $101.2 million[2] |
The Recruit is a 2003 American spy thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell and Bridget Moynahan. It is produced by Spyglass Entertainment, in association with Epsilon Motion Pictures and Place Productions, and released by Touchstone Pictures through Buena Vista Pictures Distribution on January 31, 2003, receiving mixed reviews from critics and grossing $101 million worldwide.[3]
Plot
[edit]This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. (December 2024) |
James Clayton is a prodigious programmer studying nonlinear cryptography at MIT, collaborating with a group of students to create Spartacus, a surveillance program that can enslave any computer's audiovisual hardware to the master computer via the internet. His group showcases the software to Dell at a campus fair, drawing substantial interest in its uses.
While working at his bartender job, James is approached by Walter Burke, a man who works for the Central Intelligence Agency and claims to have known James's deceased father. After a pitch from Burke to recruit him into the agency, James initially declines until he reconsiders it as an opportunity to get answers to his father's mysterious plane crash in Peru several years earlier.
James passes the initial security screenings and is bussed with the rest of his class to the Farm in rural Virginia, where they undergo training as potential operatives. While there, James develops an attraction to Layla Moore and a rivalry with Zack, who is James's competition for top of the class.
One night, during a training exercise in which James and Layla are paired to tail a mark, they are abducted by masked assailants, imprisoned and tortured psychologically and physically for several days. Their interrogators want to know what happens at the Farm and the names of those who teach there. After resisting for days, James breaks when he is told about Layla's brutal treatment. He reveals Burke's name, at which point, it is revealed that the whole experience was part of an exercise that the class was observing, including Layla, and that James failed by breaking. He is removed from the Farm.
Burke seeks out a despondent James and informs him that his discharge was part of a cover story because he has been selected as a non-official cover operative (NOC). He gives James a low-level data-entry position at the agency (on the basis that his progress at the Farm was sufficient for this work), so that he can get close to Layla, who has graduated from the Farm and now holds a position higher than James.
Burke explains that Layla is suspected of working with foreign agents to steal CIA secrets, specifically a highly sensitive computer virus, called "ICE-9" because it transmits via the electrical grid rather than telecommunications, and is easily capable of disabling all electrical devices on the planet instantly, thus behaving similarly to the particle from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle.
James reunites with Layla, and the two begin a romantic relationship. While staying overnight at her home, he checks her laptop for evidence of her crimes, and she plants a bug on the lapel of his winter coat. He witnesses Layla making a live drop at Union Station and follows the mysterious agent who retrieves what Layla has left behind. The two end in a shootout on the train tracks, and the agent, who is revealed to be Zack, is killed.
Believing both to be traitors, James confronts Layla, who tells him that Zack was NOC, not him, and that she was tasked with assessing the security protocols of the CIA headquarters because it is feared that someone else is stealing CIA material.
James leaves to a meet Burke, where he confronts him about what is really happening. Burke claims that the gun was loaded with blanks, and that Zack's death was faked. Meanwhile, James is loaded with non-lethal ammunition, and everyone is intending to rendezvous for debriefing. However, Burke catches James off-guard and shoots at him, narrowly missing him but blowing out the rear window of his vehicle, proving that the gun was, in fact, loaded with live ammunition, and that Zack is indeed dead.
Burke pursues James through the abandoned warehouse where they are parked, taunting James with an explanation of why he set up the elaborate lie to implicate them and cover up his own crimes of selling agency secrets to foreign governments. Meanwhile, James has set up a laptop running Spartacus; although it failed to connect, he leads Burke to believe it successfully transmitted his confession to the agency and he has now been incriminated for everything.
Burke angrily destroys the laptop and pursues James out of the warehouse, where a CIA strike team led by Dennis Slayne, another Farm instructor, is waiting. Burke launches into a tirade, airing his grievances against the agency, believing that he was never appreciated for all the sacrifices he made in his career. Slayne realizes that Burke is the one for whom they are looking and directs the strike team to target Burke to take into custody, revealing that they are there to arrest James.
Realizing that he truly is incriminated, Burke refuses to be taken into custody, and instead raises his empty gun at the strike team, who shoot and kill him. Slayne returns James to headquarters for a debriefing, along the way alluding that James was meant to be in that line of work because "it’s in [his] blood", suggesting that his father worked for the agency, despite Burke's earlier denial.
Cast
[edit]- Colin Farrell as James Douglas Clayton
- Al Pacino as CIA Officer Walter Burke
- Bridget Moynahan as CIA Officer Layla Moore
- Gabriel Macht as CIA Officer Zack
- Kenneth Mitchell as Alan
- Karl Pruner as CIA Agent Dennis Slayne
- Mike Realba as Ronnie Gibson
- Elisa Moolecherry as Lisa Sahadi
- Merwin Mondesir as Stan
- Sam Kalilieh as Elliot
- Chris Owens as Art Wallis
- Richard Fitzpatrick as Rob Stevens
- Ron Lea as Bill Rudolph, Dell Rep.
- Tova Smith as Beth
- Michael Rubenfeld as Felix
Production
[edit]Development on the film was first announced in August 1998.[4] The film was produced by Gary Barber's and Roger Birnbaum's production company Spyglass Entertainment, with financial support from Disney's Touchstone Pictures and German film financing company Epsilon Motion Pictures (which was owned by the Kirch Group at the time).[5] Filming began on December 3, 2001. It was filmed mainly in Toronto and Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada, with some landmark scenes, such as that from the Iwo Jima Memorial by the Arlington National Cemetery, shot in and around Washington, D.C. The film's working title was The Farm. James Foley was considered to direct, but was replaced by Donaldson before filming began.[6][7]
A video game adaptation was proposed by Torus Games for BAM! Entertainment,[8][9] but the game was retooled into Ice Nine before release.[10]
Reception
[edit]Box office
[edit]The film was released on January 31, 2003, and earned $16.3 million in its first weekend. Its final gross was $52.8 million in the United States and $48.4 million internationally, for a total of $101.2 million.[2]
Critical response
[edit]On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 44%, based on 165 reviews, with an average rating of 5.55/10. The website's critics consensus states, "This polished thriller is engaging until it takes one twist too many into the predictable."[3] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 56 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.[11] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of B+ on a scale of A+ to F.[12]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a positive review, with a B+ score. He wrote, "From the get-go, The Recruit is one of those thrillers that delights in pulling the rug out from under you, only to find another rug below that."[13]
Carla Meyer of San Francisco Chronicle gave a positive review to the film, stating, "Pacino and Farrell bring a wary curiosity to their early scenes, with Farrell displaying a palpable hunger for praise and Pacino a corresponding mastery of how to hook somebody by parceling out compliments. They're a swarthier version of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt in Spy Game–only The Recruit is more about mind games."[14]
Todd McCarthy of Variety stated, "The whole picture may be hokey, but the first part is agreeably so, the second part not. At the very least, one comes away with a new appreciation of the difficulty of interoffice romance at the CIA."[15]
Mike Clark of USA Today gave a mixed review to the film, stating, "Nothing is ever what it seems, but still, nothing's very compelling in The Recruit, a less-than-middling melodrama whose subject matter and talent never click as much as its credits portend."[16]
CIA reaction
[edit]In 2009, the movie was reviewed by new CIA employees, who wrote that although "everyone in the Agency believes the movie is ridiculous", the movie is "entertaining", and that "all of the covert service trainees watched the film on the bus going into training" for "comic relief".[17]
According to T.J. Waters (a former Farm student), The Recruit is "a mediocre movie" in which he "recognize[s] a lot of similarities with the real Farm".[18]
References
[edit]- ^ "The Recruit (2003)". The Wrap. Archived from the original on March 25, 2017. Retrieved March 23, 2017.
- ^ a b "The Recruit (2003)". Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Archived from the original on November 7, 2011. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ a b "The Recruit". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. 31 January 2003. Archived from the original on 16 October 2011. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ "Mouse looks at Spyglass". Variety. Archived from the original on April 23, 2022. Retrieved May 27, 2024.
- ^ Variety, November 24, 2005: Kinowelt buys Epsilon Archived June 26, 2015, at the Wayback Machine Linked 2014-01-13
- ^ Fleming, Michael (August 12, 2001). "Spyglass taps 'Farm' hands". Variety. Archived from the original on April 22, 2022. Retrieved April 22, 2022.
- ^ Dunkley, Cathy (November 6, 2001). "Donaldson moves to 'Farm'". Variety. Archived from the original on April 22, 2022. Retrieved April 22, 2022.
- ^ Harris, Craig (2002-06-05). "The Recruit". IGN. Archived from the original on 2022-10-03. Retrieved 2023-08-16.
- ^ Harris, Craig (2002-07-31). "The Recruit". IGN. Archived from the original on 2020-08-11. Retrieved 2023-08-16.
- ^ "Ice Nine". IGN. 2004-03-10. Archived from the original on 2022-10-03. Retrieved 2023-08-16.
- ^ "The Recruit" Archived 2011-02-21 at the Wayback Machine. Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ "Find CinemaScore" (Type "Recruit" in the search box). CinemaScore. Archived from the original on January 2, 2018. Retrieved August 13, 2020.
- ^ Gleiberman, Owen (January 15, 2003). "The Recruit Review". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on August 24, 2007. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ Meyer, Carla (January 31, 2003). "Colin Farrell put to the test as CIA trainee in taut spy-school thriller 'The Recruit'". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on March 6, 2008. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ McCarthy, Todd (January 20, 2003). "The Recruit Review". Variety. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ Clark, Mike (January 30, 2003). "'Recruit' fails to follow through". USAToday.com. Archived from the original on August 8, 2010. Retrieved October 14, 2011.
- ^ "Studies in Intelligence Vol. 53, No. 2" (PDF). August 24, 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 26, 2011. Retrieved June 25, 2017.
- ^ Waters, T. J. (2007). Class 11: My Story Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class. Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN 978-04-52288-71-3.
External links
[edit]- 2003 films
- 2000s spy thriller films
- American spy thriller films
- Films about the Central Intelligence Agency
- Films directed by Roger Donaldson
- Films produced by Roger Birnbaum
- Films scored by Klaus Badelt
- Films set in Toronto
- Films set in Virginia
- Films set in Washington, D.C.
- Films set in Boston
- Films shot in Toronto
- Films shot in Virginia
- Films shot in Washington, D.C.
- Films with screenplays by Kurt Wimmer
- Films with screenplays by Mitch Glazer
- Spyglass Entertainment films
- Techno-thriller films
- Touchstone Pictures films
- 2000s English-language films
- 2000s American films
- English-language spy thriller films