Spy Game

On his last day in the CIA, agent Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) recounts the story of Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt), whom he recruited and mentored. Bishop is about to be executed for a rogue raid on a Chinese prison, and Muir wants to rescue him. The excess of talk, some of it nicely smart-alecky, is relieved by much standard action-movie fieldwork: explosions, car chases, muttering. Though the film ranges the world and the decades in search of coherence and consequence, it finds none.