Who’s Playing Who?

It’s hard to hate a good espionage thriller. Spies working against spies, double and triple crosses, all building to a grand reveal then brings everything together as the bad guys’ plan comes crumbling down. A good spy thriller has more twists than you can shake a stick at, but manages to convey it all effortlessly and seamlessly. It walks you right along the path, step by step, and, with the right sleight of hand, you don’t even realize what’s being set up until everything comes out all at once. And it can be so very satisfying to watch.

Released in 2001, Spy Game is a film all about spies and espionage. It’s right there in the title. It follows two characters through a couple of decades of work for the CIA, spinning an elaborate tale about how they met, how they worked together, and what happened after. And through it all it also presents an interesting case, in the present (well, the present of the film) of good and bad spies and how sometimes to do the right thing you have to go rogue. It’s a very deftly put together little spy caper that, even two decades later, is still a lot of fun to watch.

Robert Redford plays Nathan Muir, a CIA case officer who is on his last day with the agency, getting ready to retire to a quiet little island he’s saved up for. Before he can pack up and leave for the day, though, he’s called into a hush-hush meeting with the top brass of the agency. Apparently, a former operative he ran, Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) got himself into some trouble in China. He tried to break a prisoner out of a high security facility in the country, was caught, and now they’re threatening to kill him in 24 hours. Since Muir ran Bishop’s ops for multiple years, they want to know all about the operative.

Thus, Muir settles in to tell the story of how he met and trained Bishop. Muir found Bishop in Vietnam, when he needed a sniper to take out a high level North Vietnamese officer. The op is a success, but Bishop’s spotter, Tran (Benedict Wong), is injured during the op and Bishop has to help him safety. Muir, impressed by Bishop’s fortitude, brings him on as a fiend agent. He slowly trains him, getting him ready for field work in East Berlin, before setting him on ops to bring defectors over. But then, in a new operation down in Beirut, the relationship between Muir and Bishop sours. The op goes wrong, Muir makes a call, and Bishop gets someone killed. They go their separate ways, and stop talking. But now, with Bishop in danger, Muir has to make a call about whether to save his agent or hang him out to dry.

The format of Spy Game, while seemingly somewhat twisty, is really quite simple. After the introduction showing Bishop trying to save a person (the identity of whom we learn later) we then cut to Muir who, over the course of a full day, tells tales about what he and Bishop got up to over the previous two decades. These stories inform us, the viewer, as to their past, but it also allows the group around the table time to decide if Bishop is an asset worth saving, or one they should sacrifice to further goals with China. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bishop is named after a Chess piece while the world’s two superpowers, the U.S. and China, face off. Sacrifice the piece to win the game, maybe?

As we learn, though, for Muir it’s all a game. He’s been on the job for three-plus decades and he’s very good at what he does. This isn’t just a time to share stories and inform his leaders about what happened all those years ago. Instead, he treats it like an interrogation, feeding information and stealing hints and secrets back. He’s never “their guy”, instead working all sides, seeing what’s going on, learning what the real plan is. He has one goal in this, to save his asset (Bishop) and get out safely.

Of course, in the process we do get to learn about both characters (at least as much as we can with a probably unreliable narrator pulling the strings). In the present Muir is our protagonist, the one we focus on while he’s trying to piece together what’s really going on. But in the past, Bishop is our guy, the one we follow and learn about, as he goes on his arc from military grunt to top level CIA operator. We get to see both of them in action, watch their arcs, and get invested in their double story, proving that the way the story is told really benefits the movie.

Having Robert Redford in a lead role doesn’t hurt at all. He’s one of the great actors of his generation, starring in a ton of fantastic films, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting to The Natural and Sneakers, and even taking a stint in the MCU in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It’s films like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men, as well as a lesser hit like Spy Game, that made his appearance in a Marvel spy thriller later feel so natural. This was his element and he could sell it with ease.

Brad Pitt is, well, not as good. He’s not bad as Bishop, but he’s not really playing a character so much as playing Brad Pitt (something he does in most of his roles). Pitt is a limited actor, but he’s fairly good at playing himself charismatically. He brings that here, and his portrayal of Bishop makes him seem like someone that could easily pair up with Muir, be led by him, formed and molded into an agent by the senior operative. I think it works in context, but he’s not the draw for the film the way Redford is, that’s for sure.

This is the Robert Redford show, and it’s on his shoulders that the film works. The twists and turns are fun the first time around, but they seem more and more obvious when you go back and watch the film again. But that’s fine because even when you know where the movie is going and have all the beats memorized, Redford’s performance is what sells it. He wraps the film, and the other characters, around him and plays everything like a fiddle. Pitt is here to provide a second name and a pretty face for the posters, but this is Redford’s movie, through and through.

And that’s fine. It’s what makes the movie good. You have to want an old school, 1990s-style, espionage thriller, and if you do, the movie works. It’ll feel like a throwback to the time of Jack Ryan movies with Harrison Ford, the comforting kind of Dad Film that so many like to watch. It’s comfort food, of a certain variety, where no one questions the morality of the main character and hard decisions that are made are done for the right reasons. You can shout “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” because someone in the CIA was doing the right thing. In the moment it works… you just might not care that much about the film once you’re done, the entertainment fleeting, vanishing on the air as the credits roll.