As you read this, the clock is ticking when it comes to Colin Farrell. He’s one of those actors whom the media anoints as a star before anybody really knows who the heck he is. Whenever such a thing happens, the newly minted star faces immense pressure to act in movies successful enough to support the hype. Succeed, and you’re Gwyneth Paltrow. Fail, and you’re Gretchen Mol. (The jury’s still out on Vin Diesel, and let’s just call Matthew McConaughey a toss-up.)
With the notable exceptions of his little-seen ‘breakout’ role in Tigerland and his supporting part in Minority Report, Farrell’s films (American Outlaws, Hart’s War) have done little to validate his claim to fame. His latest, The Recruit, proves to be a fairly bland piece of star-vehicle packaging in which he plays James Clayton, an MIT grad student/sexy Cambridge bartender who has developed an innovative new computer program that will bring him affluence and job security for the rest of his life. Clayton decides to put that future on hold, however, when Walter Burke (Al Pacino), a seasoned government spy, offers him a chance to train as a CIA field agent at the top-secret spy school known as ‘The Farm.’
Burke puts Clayton through a gauntlet of trials at The Farm, where the recruits learn to break into houses, plant bugs, avoid capture and kill people in a variety of ways. A female recruit, one with the only-in-the-movies moniker Layla Moore, played by Bridget Moynahan (wasn’t there a Bond girl with that name?) competes with Clayton for CIA agent stripes and, of course, winds up in his bed. Clayton’s biggest test, however, comes when Burke puts him onto a real, honest-to-goodness espionage case involving a computer virus with global-disaster potential. Chase scenes, shoot-outs and numerous double-crosses ensue.
As long as The Recruit follows Clayton through the hell of being a CIA trainee, it maintains a consistent level of interest. The film uses that old sawthe lie detector testfor a nifty scene between Clayton and Layla, and Farrell acts the hell out of a gritty simulated-torture scene. Once the action moves away from The Farm, however, the film relies on predictable Chinese box plot twists. Nothing that happens in The Recruit will surprise anyone who’s seen The Game (or even the film’s own trailer, which gave away pretty much everything back when it ran before Red Dragon).
The characters, as conceived by screenwriters Roger Towne, Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer, are written as two-dimensional vehicles for the actors to flaunt their personalities as much as possible. They seem more like generic action figures than real people. Pacino, braying for his paycheck in a role that barely qualifies as second lead, seems to think he’s doing a remake of Devil’s Advocate. Moynahan (she played The Girl in The Sum of All Fears and took a nasty spill as Mr. Big’s fiancée on the third season of ‘Sex and the City’) suggests Ashley Judd after a weekend in Stepford. Perennial third banana Gabriel Macht (Behind Enemy Lines), as a recruit who initially looks like a romantic rival for Layla, appears to have done his best work on the cutting-room floor. That leaves Farrell to do most of the heavy lifting, and for what it’s worth, he seems to have the goods. Big-name male stars tend to sleepwalk through formula action thrillers once they’re lucky enough to get the big bucks to do them (Bruce Willis, Robert De Niro and Mel Gibson have been guilty of this offense on numerous occasions, and Ben Affleck has been doing it like a pro lately). Farrell, however, is still semi-unknown and therefore still hungry. He puts effort into the performance, and he’s a pleasure to watchconvincing as a man of remarkable intelligence and ingenuity, yet Regular Joe enough to sell the idea that he can’t believe what’s going on around him.
The Recruit may be too routine to break out as a major hit and propel Farrell to the A-list. By the time it sputters to a close, few in the audience will likely be on the edge of their seats. Nevertheless, it should serve as further proof that Farrell has enough talent and charisma to carry big Hollywood moviesif Hollywood can bother to write decent vehicles for him.
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