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75As a thriller, The Recruit is merely an entertaining ride. But remember: Nothing is what it seems. It's the subtext -- two actors from different generations faking each other out with skill and affection -- that counts.
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75Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.
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A labyrinthine brain twister.
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63It's the kind of movie you can sit back and enjoy, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking too much.
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63It suddenly morphs into one more overly slick, empty show.
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63The sort of movie you enjoy much more while you're watching it in the theater than when you're deconstructing it on the way home.
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63May have a storyline as generic as its title, but in the explosive Pacino and the smoldering Farrell (who nearly stole "Minority Report" from Tom Cruise), it has a pair of stars who are not as easily dismissed.
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63Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.
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63There's nothing excessively problematical with The Recruit that excising the final fifteen minutes wouldn't cure.
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63Not even Pacino can save it.
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63By contemporary standards, The Recruit is a halfway decent spy melodrama -- at least to the halfway point.
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50The first half packs some clever surprises, but eventually you'll wish you'd signed up with another movie.
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60Spare, sleek and coolly entertaining, even if there's less to this game of true lies than meets the eye.
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60There are glimpses of a real actor struggling to get out of Pacino, although they are rare. It’s as if Pacino is dying to act, but he’s either too old or director Roger Donaldson just isn’t allowing him to do it.
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50The pleasure of watching two alpha males -– Al Pacino and Colin Farrell -– circling each other mano a mano substantially beefs up this otherwise routine spy thriller.
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83From 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.
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58It's just never as gripping as it needs to be.
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70Visibly uninspired, Pacino gives a perfunctory performance -- though surely he must have looked over at Farrell and been reminded of himself 30 years ago, all jacked-up and beautiful, like a stallion at the gate.
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70The 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 inner-office romance at the CIA.
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60Just the latest forgettable thriller that might have been enjoyable if only its conclusion lived up to its windup.
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60But by the end the audience, along with Clayton, has been jerked around so many times that it's almost too exhausting...By then, it's almost impossible to care.
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60No matter how seriously everyone works to make the CIA impossibly sexy, the illusion that these pencil pushers are incarnations of Bond, James Bond, is difficult to sustain.
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60Like Christopher Walken or Marlon Brando, Mr. Pacino frequently uses his gifts to make mediocre movies more interesting. Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but he, at least, is not.
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50Donaldson and his battery of screenwriters aim for nothing more than a coolly efficient thrill machine, but the mechanics break down in the end, foiled by a "whodunit" twist that's telegraphed early in the first reel. Careening forward without any real purpose, the film simply flies off the rails.
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50The Recruit is like vaudeville night at Bellevue.
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50It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas. Is it anything? Not really.
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40Cliché-density aside, Roger Donaldson's perfectly rote movie is childishly naive about the reality of the CIA as it stands in the official record and in the public mindset.
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63So much is so good about The Recruit that you'll wish the ending were better. It's like opening the last lid in a Chinese box and having a clown figure pop out on a spring.
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63One of many small reasons to like The Recruit is that it pays homage to Kurt Vonnegut, a forgotten old lion of literature.
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50A less-than-middling melodrama whose subject matter and talent never click as much as its credits portend.
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50For the most part it's a completely ordinary, completely familiar, professionally executed film. Nothing truly awful, but nothing unexpected, either.
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70Compelling, if throwaway, drama.
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60It milks the characters' father-son relationship for drama without making the fairly obvious connection to the agency's paternalistic view of the world.
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50For most of this movie, things are exactly what they seem--mediocre.
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40Al Pacino is his own venue as yet another flamboyant, self-ironic, self-dramatizing, self-parodying, self-selfing quasi-Mephistopheles. His performance isn't very good, but it's big.
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40The Recruit is quick and tense, and some of it is fun, but I didn't believe a single thing in it, and the over-all effect of the movie is to make one depressed that the Christmas "art" season is over. [27 January 2003, p. 94]
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Negative: 3 out of 8
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