A nothing-is-what-it-seems spy game from director Roger Donaldson, who gave us (most relevantly) No Way Out. That grouping of words even crops up in a climactic line of dialogue: "You've got no way out but me." Is this just a coincidence or is it an encryption? In that same vein, one might wonder whether the hero's part-time job as a bartender alludes (less relevantly) to the same director's Cocktail. Is this a way of insinuating that Colin Farrell, linked with Tom Cruise in Minority Report, is now the new Cruise? (The old, in case you hadn't noticed, has entered middle age.) In any event it is while mixing drinks that the hero, a computer whiz who "majored in Nonlinear Cryptography" at MIT, is first contacted by a CIA recruiter, a self-proclaimed "scary judge of talent," who then puts our man through his paces at a sort of spy boot camp, "affectionately known as The Farm," before handpicking him for the top-secret assignment of ferreting out a mole. We can be grateful that the unspooling plotline has not been weighted down with extraneous action (beyond the hero's ferocious workouts on a punching bag: those, and the forty square inches of tattoos on his upper arm, tell you he's no nerd), but the filmmakers seem a little anxious, a little apologetic, about it, throwing in a lot of wasted motion by way of a restless camera and a rushed pace. The actors -- the weary know-it-all, Al Pacino, alongside that thin-skinned innocent, Farrell -- contribute their share of wasted motion, and add to it a lot of wasted emotion as well. These florid performers give the impression that "The Company" as presently constituted is less suited to saving the world than to singing Verdi. With Bridget Moynahan and Gabriel Macht. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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