The Recruit: Critic Reviews

A CIA thriller that plays some very tricky and entertaining spy games.

Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but [Pacino], at least, is not.

A less-than-middling melodrama whose subject matter and talent never click as much as its credits portend.

A compelling, if throwaway, drama.

It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas.

A serviceable spy thriller that stumbles over one too many plot twists, one too many shots of its hero typing desperately at his computer, and a romantic subplot that's nice to look at but awfully silly.

The Recruit weighs in like a porous brick of recycled polypropylene.

This is Donaldson's third thriller set amid Washington's powerful. They've all been winners -- smart, taut and more satisfying than anyone has a right to expect.

We've seen movies like The Recruit before, but this one is fun.

The foreshadowing is a bit heavy-handed, but the writers and director largely manage the tension and mystery tactfully.

It's the kind of movie you can sit back and enjoy, as long as you don't make the mistake of thinking too much.

While The Recruit is fast and slick enough to carry us along during its setup scenes, the screenplay isn't witty or tricky enough to sustain the payoff.

Probably better than anyone else working today, Donaldson knows how to knit a thriller. Each time you think this taut yarn is about to unravel, that's when he pulls the wool over your eyes.

The Recruit is serviceable spy fodder made a great guilty pleasure by Pacino's 'OK, no Oscar here, let's have some fun' performance.

In this tepid spy thriller, everything is pretty much what you would expect.

Here I suspected the ultimate villain almost from the very beginning -- and, if I wasn't fooled, I can't imagine anyone else will be, either.

For more than an hour, The Recruit is slickly entertaining escapism that deftly plays into common fantasies about what training to be a CIA op might be like.

The Recruit may have a storyline as generic as its title, but in the explosive Pacino and the smoldering Farrell, it has a pair of stars who are not as easily dismissed.

Fun but make few demands on moviegoers.

The Recruit manages to be almost utterly without innovation apart from its heroic determination to make matinee idol material out of a spy agency that pioneered the process of extra-legal bureaucratic sociopathology known as 'black ops.'

Beyond the opening frames, the whole movie has an altogether musty odour, as if those up-to-the-minute lines had simply been tacked on to a mothballed script.

Preposterous CIA thriller.

A conjurer's trick that delights for about an hour, then spirals into idiocy.