Spy Game

The reunion of Brad Pitt and Robert Redford in Spy Game is being welcomed by most critics, but none are giving it a top rating. Enjoy it for what it is, writes Newsweek's David Ansen, a fleet, handsome fantasy of globe-hopping blond demigods. A.O. Scott says that director Tony Scott (presumably no relation) employs many of the conventions he used in Top Gun, Crimson Tide and Enemy of the States. They are, he writes, like gadgets in the Sharper Image catalog: sleek, expensive handsome gizmos of doubtful utility. Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times uses a different analogy. What Spy Game turns out to be, he writes, 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. Yet another analogy comes from Rita Kempley in the Washington Post, who gives the film one of its best notices: The movie is sleek and shiny as a new bullet, reflecting Scott's patented surplus of style, but in this case that only enhances a stirring drama about the moral ambiguities native to intelligence-gathering.