Spy Game (2001) [Collector’s Edition (Widescreen)] – DVD
**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Robert Redford, Brad Pitt, Catherine McCormack, Stephen Dillane
screenplay by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata
directed by Tony Scott
by Walter Chaw The defining moment of Spy Game, Tony Scott’s latest exercise in stylistic excess, occurs at about the midway point. Playing CIA spymaster Nathan Muir, Robert Redford debriefs his best agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) atop a building in Cold War Berlin. After a tense exchange, an enraged Bishop throws his chair off the barren, windswept rooftop. The problem with the scene is neither the preposterous screenplay by Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata to which it belongs, nor Scott’s infatuation with the panoramic aerial shot, nor the way that Harry Gregson-Williams’s ubiquitous score threatens here and at every other moment to rupture your eardrums. It’s not even in the ridiculously out-of-place imagistic Xerox of Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’s melancholy ode to love and Berlin.