The Recruit gets the boot

Nothing you read in this review is real. Or maybe it is. How do you know? You don't know. You can't know. Maybe Saddam Hussein has hacked into this computer system and written this review. Maybe he's disguised as Ms. Fus and is right now forging your attendance records. The government will never know. Your teachers will never know. You think you know? You know nothing.

But back to the movie.

If there is one thing people will know while watching The Recruit, it's each and every plot twist along the long road of predictability. The Recruit runs like a grade school CIA fantasy: a glorified, melodramatic vision of the CIA that is standard fare and ultimately very flawed.

CIA agent Walter Burke (Al Pacino) invites recent MIT graduate James Clayton (Colin Farrell) to The Farm, a CIA training base for undercover agents. There, Burke proceeds to teach Clayton and the other wide-eyed innocents the basic CIA mantra, straight from the movies. They have no friends, they trust no one, they have rampant sex with hot women, blah blah blah, it's the same old shtick.

Or maybe it's a totally new schtick and you'll never know the truth. How could you tell? You can't. Sorry.

After cracking during an interrogation test, Clayton is supposedly dropped from The Farm. However, as Burke is so fond of saying, nothing is as it seems. Burke hauls Clayton out of the alcoholic stupor into which he has sunk since his release to tell him that he passed his training with flying colors and is needed for a surveillance mission. In the interest of sticking with "nothing is as it seems" (God forbid this movie use a different cliché occasionally), Layla (Bridget Moynahan), a fellow Farm newbie with whom Clayton was beginning to develop a romantic relationship, is actually a foreign spy sent to steal a new-fangled computer virus capable of knocking out the entire electronics system of a nation. Or something like that.

Clayton's mission is to re-establish contact with Layla, using the cover of a low-level CIA position, and find out how the sneaky little bugger is getting the virus out of the CIA compound, who she's working for and to whom she is giving the information. Several predictable plot twists later, Clayton has been shot, bruised, beaten and thoroughly disillusioned and the entire latter half of the movie has been rendered utterly pointless.

But what if the movie's actually brilliantly original and this review is a lie? A plant, meant to fake you out? Just think. How much do you really know about this movie?

In the interest of making The Recruit as complex as possible, screenwriters Kurt Wimmer, Mitch Glazer and Roger Towne forgot to make the movie make sense. They severely underestimate the intelligence of their main characters, having them act out a childish charade of CIA life. For example, Layla knows that Clayton drives a humongous, bright-red pickup truck, which is not the most subtle of vehicles. Yet he still chooses to drive it while pursuing her undercover, as though with her CIA training she wouldn't notice a car roughly the size and color of a barn approaching in her rearview mirror.

The Recruit can be a fun movie to watch, although not on the serious level on which it wants to be taken. There are a couple of decently exciting chase sequences to break up the ubiquitous plot twists. Watching Clayton and Layla dance around each other, each trying to bug and double-cross the other while still maintaining a sexual relationship is amusing. In fact, the movie is at its best when there are four agents running around working for different people all trying to use the others for their purpose. Unfortunately, events leading up to that point can be plodding and dull, with the movie becoming really engaging only in the last fifteen minutes.

Pacino steals the show as a jaded CIA recruiter with a caustic sense of humor and brutally realistic view of his job. He manages to pull off the dual-role of Clayton's father figure and worst enemy with ease and style. He and Farrell have a chemistry (missing from Farrell and Moynahan's interactions) that somewhat transcends their stereotypical roles.

As a whole, The Recruit is a sophomoric CIA tale with a needlessly complicated plot that causes it to verge on the nonsensical.

Or maybe it isn't.