Too much hoo-ha

How precisely do you get to become a member of the CIA? This is the quiz at the beginning of a film that purports to take the lid off the internal workings of America's intelligence service.

The answer is: Al Pacino seduces you just as Mephistopheles tempted Faust. Perhaps it was too much to expect subtlety - this is, after all, a high-concept Hollywood movie, and the opening 45 minutes are great fun - but in the wake of television's 24, Roger Donaldson's movie looks like Spooking for Beginners.

Computer genius and athletically attractive brainiac James Clayton (Colin Farrell) is "noticed" by CIA talent scout Walter Burke (Al Pacino) and invited on to the organisation's training programme.

Intrigued and flattered the young man goes along with it and gives a good account of himself in the written exams, the practical skills and the various tests and trials set to trip up the unwary candidate. But then he falls for the charms of fellow trainee Layla (Bridget Moynahan) and flunks a couple of tests.

Blown out of the programme, he consoles himself with a bottle of Jack Daniel's (spot the cliché) until Burke turns up unexpectedly to give him an undercover mission to root out an enemy mole. At which point the film goes pear-shaped.

Donaldson, a New Zealand director who has made good in Hollywood, gives good action, but he could have done with a better script. Once Clayton embarks on a clandestine catandmouse chase logic goes out of the window, breaking glass en route.

As if to compensate for the lack of plot clarity, Pacino is given a couple of monologues that are lamentably simplistic and it is no wonder he displays a lack of conviction in a role that, frankly, he could have phoned in. This is a definite regression from Insomnia, the last performance in which he really immersed himself fathoms deep into a character.

In the politically controlled climate of his own organisation, Burke appears to be an outsider, a strategic miscalculation on behalf of the trio of screenwriters. As a result, Pacino relies on his hammy old "Hoo Ha!" tricks of delivery and is even saddled with a signature refrain "I'm a scary judge of character" that I thought had gone out with the Eighties ( remember Schwarzenegger's "I'll be back"?). His address to the new recruits in particular (supposedly the smartest of their generation) is toe-curlingly simplistic in its gung-ho sentiments.

As if this film didn't have enough problems, it also suffers from the curious compulsion to fill the big screen with details from the small screens of computer terminals and laptops that is rendering Hollywood thrillers very uninteresting to look at. The obsession with data retrieval and data deception may be the technological equivalent of that old literary standby, the misplaced letter, but it is fast lapsing into cliché - and the fact that the climax hinges on just such a deception is a decided weakness.

The attempt to up the ante on the film's credibility by references to the works of Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse 5 and Breakfast of Champions all get a look in) is at best spurious and at worst risible. A lot of hoo-ha about nothing.

The Recruit
Cert: cert12A