The Recruit
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- For the episode of the TV series Dad's Army see The Recruit (Dad's Army episode)
| The Recruit | |
|---|---|
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| Directed by | Roger Donaldson |
| Produced by | Jeff Apple Gary Barber Roger Birnbaum |
| Written by | Roger Towne Kurt Wimmer Mitch Glazer |
| Starring | Al Pacino Colin Farrell |
| Music by | Klaus Badelt |
| Cinematography | Stuart Dryburgh |
| Editing by | David Rosenbloom |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista Pictures |
| Release date(s) | January 28, 2003 (USA) |
| Running time | 115 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Recruit is a spy thriller movie starring Colin Farrell and Al Pacino. It was released in 2003. It follows the career of a recent MIT graduate recruited into the CIA.
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[edit] Plot details
The Recruit sits somewhat distinguished in the espionage genre as it details the process of conversion of James Clayton (Colin Farrell) from fairly ordinary MIT final year student, into an intelligence officer with the CIA.
The film begins with several flashes of James’ internet homepage in which he constantly trawls for information about his father, who presumably had gone missing when Clayton was quite young. In the first scene James wakes up in his shared student flat to the sounds of the telephone ringing. Upon answering it, somewhat reluctantly, he realizes that he had forgotten and is now late for the MIT graduate recruitment careers fair. The reason for the importance of this fair is that of his group of graduating students, it is he that has possession of a disk containing a rather impressive program that turns computer terminals to which it is networked, into its slave.
The program, called SPARTACUS, impresses a previously skeptical grad recruiter for Dell, and it appears that James' future is on track.
Later that night, when James is working his casual job as a bartender in the UniBar, he sees Walter Burke (Al Pacino), who he had previously noticed hanging around at the careers fair. The two begin talking during which time Burke intimates to Clayton that he is in fact a CIA recruiter. James, however, is not interested and Burke walks away, casually revealing to James a familiarity with his Father. At this, James becomes intrigued and decides to attend the interview and selection process for the CIA's clandestine service.
Upon arriving at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Clayton takes part in numerous assessments including psychometric, numerical reasoning, psychological, psychoanalytical, aptitude, and a polygraph test. Particular attention is given to the apparent obscurity of many of the questions in the psychological examination, providing an insight into just how complicated the screening for intelligence officers in the CIA actually is. A specific example would be when the psychoanalyst asks James "Quickly! Would you rather ride on a train, dance in the rain, or feel no pain?", to which Clayton responds that he'd rather dance in the rain but changes his answer to 'feel no pain'. During the testing he meets Layla Moore (Bridget Moynahan).
Having been apparently successful in the selection process he and the other successful candidates, including Layla, and driven by bus to The Farm, the CIA training facility in Virginia. Burke then briefs the candidates on the training regime and various polemic issues of espionage and afterwards Clayton attempts to befriend him in order to find out what Burke knows about his father's involvement in the CIA. Burke rebukes him, warning him that they're not friends, but instructor and pupil.
Clayton and the other candidates then begin their training in covert ops and intelligence gathering. After one such day, it the recruits have a night off and several are sitting in their dorm room playing poker. At this point Clayton and Zach (Gabriel Macht) face off revealing the competitive nature of their relationship. Burke interrupts and takes the recruits present (all males) to a nearby bar for "drinks". Their actual purpose, however, is to conduct a training exercise with one simple objective: "to reach the parking lot with an asset who intends to have sex with [them]", in other words, to pick up a girl. James appears to do exceedingly well at first until he spots Layla, alone at a table, apparently quite inebriated. He abandons the girl to which he was talking and Layla tells him that she was 'cut' from the program. James offers to call a cab for her as an act of sympathy, but Layla manages to draw him outside where, upon reaching the parking lot with her, James learns that actually she had a training mission of her own. Namely, to prevent him from completing his mission, at which she was successful.
James gets his own back however when he embarrasses Layla during training in how to fool a polygraph machine. Here, he traps Layla into revealing her attraction to him. In doing this, he realizes that he has in fact hurt the one person with whom he had had romantic interests.
Throughout the various stages of the training, the instructors become increasingly impressed by James' natural ability in the "black arts" of espionage such as weapons, classroom exercises and his ingenuity and fast thinking when he manages to escape from a botched training drill by dramatically jumping through a glass window.
When he and Layla finally make up and Burke finds out about their romantic interest with one another, they are sent on a training exercise in counter-surveillance. During this exercise, James and Layla are kidnapped by men apparently from a foreign intelligence service. James is interrogated for several days in a dungeon-like cell and tortured. He is asked to give up the names of his instructors and holds out until one of his interrogators provides evidence that his defiance is contributing not only to his suffering, but also that of Layla. He yells out Burke's name and suddenly the rear wall of the cell rises up revealing that Burke, Layla and the other candidates sitting in the lecture theater had witnessed the entire event.
James is informed that he has been cut from the program and is put up in a hotel in much the same fashion as was described to him by Layla when she had feigned the same fate. After proceeding to get thoroughly drunk, he makes a fool of himself by leaving a drunken message on the voicemail of the Dell recruiter, asking for a chance for employment.
In the morning, however, Walter Burke arrives to tell him that he had feigned cutting James from training in order to appoint him as a non-official cover operative. (An intelligence officer who is not afforded the protection of diplomatic status when committing espionage.) Burke tells James that he has been paired with Layla in order to spy on her, as the CIA has evidence that she is a mole of a foreign intelligence service recruited to extract a top-secret new virus from the CIA. James reluctantly agrees and re-established contact with Layla, pretending to join the CIA as a low-level data-entry office worker and getting to know her. During this time, they become romantically involved and the tension is apparent when, after making love, Layla bugs James' coat with a listening device.
James eventually uncovers proof that Layla is removing the virus from CIA laboratories piece by piece. He follows her to uncover the identities of her contacts and winds up pursuing one contact through a train station. The identity of the contact is concealed by his hooded jumper until James shoots him in a scuffle. Layla's contact turns out to be Zach, who dies almost straight away. James escapes the scene and confronts Layla with evidence of her treachery, demanding an explanation. She explains that, in fact, she and Zach had been commissioned by the CIA to test the security protocols of the facility by attempting to remove a "fake" virus. By virtue of his familiarity with computer programs, however, James suspects differently and confronts Burke with these contradictions at an abandoned warehouse. Burke, at first, congratulates Clayton on passing his final test. The virus, he says, wasn't real, nor is Zach dead. When Burke invites Clayton to shoot him with a gun which Burke supplied and which he says is actually filled with blanks, a tense moment ensues and Burke knocks the gun away, blowing out a car window.
Burke chases Clayton through a warehouse, boasting that he organized the scheme in order to sell the virus. He also shatters James' hopes about his father by saying that the story that his father was a CIA agent was only a ruse to trick James into befriending Burke. Clayton agrees to give Burke the laptop containing the completed virus, and shows Burke the screen running his own software program Spartacus, apparently relaying Burke's entire confession back to CIA headquarters. Burke becomes incensed, chasing Clayton outside, where a SWAT team has assembled to track them down. Unbeknownst to Burke, however, Clayton's link to the CIA was a fake. In actual fact, the CIA had no knowledge of Burke's treachery and were there to arrest Clayton. Burke then proceeds to nail his own coffin by railing at his unjust treatment by the CIA. Upon discovering that he himself had foiled his own plan, he commits suicide.
Upon being driven back to CIA headquarters at Langley for debriefing, one of his other instructors again suggests that James' father in fact was a CIA officer by saying, cryptically, that "[spying] is in your blood."
[edit] Cast
- Al Pacino - Walter Burke
- Colin Farrell - James Douglas Clayton
- Bridget Moynahan - Layla Moore
- Gabriel Macht - Zack
[edit] Trivia
- The "abandoned warehouse" where the final sequence in the film takes place is the same set where Chicago's prison scenes were filmed.
- There are numerous references to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., including the computer virus being named ICE-9 (from Cat's Cradle), Clayton reading Slaughterhouse-Five at the coffee shop, and Clayton referring to his father's eggs as the Breakfast of Champions.
- When shown in cinemas, the movie was in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. When it was released on DVD in May of 2003, it was presented in a ratio of 1.78:1, preserving Roger Donaldson's vision.
- The pictures that are shown during the opening credits, of James and his father are actual childhood photos of Colin Farrell and his father.
- The scene where Colin Farrell's character tells the girl at the bar how he "just got out of jail" was Farrell's idea. He supposedly said he used it on a girl in a bar one time and that it worked, so the producers put the scene in the film.
- Layla uses a Dell 16MB USB Key to sneak the ICE-9 virus code out of CIA Headquarters in Langley.
- During the scene in which Clayton kills Zack and is running from the Transit Police at Union Station in Washington, DC, he enters a subway train, the train and station he enters is not that of the Washington Metro, but it is the New York City Subway.
- The poster was featured in an episode of 8 Simple Rules
- There are many references to the name "Sonny", once is the Queen song during the poker game, the other is when Burke (Al Pacino) mentions drinks at Sonny's, this can either be coincidence or it hints at Al Pacino and his ties to the Godfather movies, "Sonny" was the name of Michael's older brother in the Godfather, and Michael was played by Al Pacino.
- Also, during the poker game one of Clayton's friends is confused over which cop Sonny Crockett is in the show Miami Vice. Colin Farrell would go on to play Crockett in the 2006 Miami Vice film.
