Spy Game

Washington Post Rita Kempley

The movie is sleek and shiny as a new bullet, reflecting Scott's patented surplus of style.

Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan

There's more to this movie. Like Pitt at his best, it's pretty, gritty, engrossing and fun.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Serves up a judicious blend of showy action, political intrigue, ticking-clock suspense and intramural CIA one-upsmanship for mainstream entertainment.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

With its cast of back-stabbing functionaries and desk jockeys, Spy Game makes the sport and hard work of espionage seem chillingly real.

Village Voice Mark Holcomb

Happily, beneath the film's nostalgic veneer and tooth-rattling visual and aural effects lies a mature ambiguity that's unusual for a holiday blockbuster -- and all but unheard of in a Tony Scott movie.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

If you like Redford, Spy Game will be a real treat: a fast electric thriller full of the old Sundance charm and pizzazz.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

The script provides an excellent payoff, although action fans may not agree, because that payoff is the equivalent of a Cheshire cat's grin.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Gripping, improbable plot marked by exciting sequences of action.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The film is brimming with plots, counterplots, dossiers, and sinister corrupt priorities, all held together by the telephoto obsidian gloss of Scott's look-ma-no-pauses style.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The movie asks tough, unflinching questions about America's responsibility to maintain world peace -- and the price we are willing to pay in order to accomplish that. Timely stuff, indeed.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

There's something elegiac in Redford's spy who knows he's a dinosaur but still has a few moves left.

USA Today Mike Clark

More than a quarter-century ago, Redford played a young CIA employee in "Three Days of the Condor." Someday, it will make a great living-room double bill with Spy Game -- the actor then and now.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Enormously satisfying and fun to watch.

Newsweek David Ansen

Entertaining but farfetched, Spy Game might have looked less meretricious a few months back. But the real world has sabotaged its pretense of authenticity. Enjoy it for what it is, a fleet, handsome fantasy of globe-hopping blond demigods.

LA Weekly John Powers

The supremely attractive leads, exotic locations (Vietnam, Berlin and Beirut) and fetishized violence imbue the whole intelligence game with undeniable glamour.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Manages to be entertaining and reasonably exciting. Scott's style may be slick and tricky but, if this and his last film, "Enemy of the State," are any indication, he's lost the glossy sadism that characterized his previous work.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's well-plotted, acted with a charismatic flair and right on the zeitgeist.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Fans of swooping helicopter shots, alleys filled with backlit geysers of steam, and jump-cut editing that makes MTV look like Ingmar Bergman will relish the intercontinental intrigue and huggermugger that is Spy Game.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It is not a bad movie, mind you; it's clever and shows great control of craft, but it doesn't care, and so it's hard for us to care about. To see it once is to plumb to the bottom of its mysteries, and beyond.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

We don't experience the drama from the inside out because everything is on the surface. Redford is the only one who supplies internal life to Spy Game.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

To make silk purses from turgid passages, Mr. Scott does what he always does, gooses them up with every trick in the big-budget book.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

What Spy Game turns out to be is the old reliable family car spruced up around the edges in an attempt to convince a new generation of buyers that it's a hot number.

New Times (L.A.) Gregory Weinkauf

A mess, but it's a rousing mess, with ample humor and action to satisfy the discerning dullard within.

Film Threat Michael Dequina

Less Bond than simply boring, a tedious and overdirected race-against-time drama with a few espionage elements thrown in.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The problem lies in the calculating pretentiousness of using human misery to make shallow entertainment seem serious. It's worth comparing Spy Game with "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman's far superior exercise in post-cold-war spycraft.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Don't you hate movies where one character is so much smarter than everyone else? That's only one problem with Spy Game, a glossy, suffocatingly predictable star vehicle for Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.

TV Guide Frank Lovece

Extremely well-shot espionage thriller that might have worked as an old-fashioned guy's-guy movie if the guys involved had any real, human personality and the espionage were actually thrilling.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Reasonably entertaining spy-versus-spy shenanigans were for me partially undercut by the hypocritical pretense that the CIA and its various forms of mischief were somehow being ridiculed.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

A dead-chamber misfire, a hollowpoint dud.