Spy Game (DVD)

It’s not often that a film starring Brad Pitt would make me leave the house and head for the Cinema, it’s a little less likely that I’d end up buying the DVD. But when a film starring both Robert Redford and Brad Pitt is advertised I normally wouldn’t bother with it. However for some unknown reason I actually did go and see this and I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Now this caught my eye from the trailers but to summarise it, we start in Hong Kong in 1991 and a Red Cross team has arrived to administer a Cholera vaccine to the inmates of a prison. Within this Red Cross team are two CIA agents who are trying to get one ...  Read the complete review

So what makes a movie hero? In the late 80’s and early 90’s we had the muscle bound hunks, Arnie and Van Damme strode across our screens like colossus. It was all wham, bam, action man. Bullets rained and our heroes gritted their teeth and delivered the dialogue while overcoming overwhelming odds. There was obviously a market for this kind of thing as both the aforementioned gentlemen made careers out of this type of beefcake flick as well as many others. So heroes should always get the girl and have a larger bicep circumference than IQ? Not necessarily, there are many exceptions to this rule. You have your romantic hero and your ordinary guy in ...  Read the complete review

Its been a while since I watched an espionage thriller, having become somewhat jaded by the genre by watching far too many of them back to back in the mid 90s. They all seemed to be pretty much the same old thing and with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and with the Cold War becoming something of a distant memory their relevance to today's world seems somewhat tenuous to say the least. Movie makers seemed to have run that particular well rather dry. Spy Game came along though with little claim to be reinventing the genre, but also receiving the kind of reviews that make you sit up and pay attention - it also has Brad Pitt and Robert Redford on the cast list amongst ...  Read the complete review

I laid down to watch Spy Game in by bed ridden state awaiting a routine thriller that was to pass the minutes away until my flu disappeared. My flu is still here but my opinion of the movie has changed. Spy Game sees Brad Pitt play CIA operative Tom Bishop. He is recruited by Nathan D. Muir (Robert Redford) and traiend in the art of spying across the globe. Move foward to the early nineties and Bishop is involved in a rescue mission that goes badly wrong. In 24 hours he will be killed and the CIA don't seem to have a large interest in saving him. Muir is on his last day of retirement when this happens and he's called into a meeting to give his views on ...  Read the complete review

Tony Scott's an efficient, if extravagant filmmaker, but Spy Game wouldn't amount to much more than a generic action thriller without the undeniable presences of Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, who give this film unremitting gravitas. Their parlance makes this worth viewing despite its silly, if engaging plot. It's 1991 and relations between America and China are looking good - they're just about to arrange a trade agreement, but there's bad news - CIA operate Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) has been captured in China whilst attempting to break a foreign national, Elizabeth Hadley (Catherine McCormack), out of a Chinese prison. To try and sort out the mess, the CIA call ...  Read the complete review