Avis Metacritic

With its cast of back-stabbing functionaries and desk jockeys, Spy Game makes the sport and hard work of espionage seem chillingly real.

Happily, beneath the film's nostalgic veneer and tooth-rattling visual and aural effects lies a mature ambiguity that's unusual for a holiday blockbuster -- and all but unheard of in a Tony Scott movie.

The script provides an excellent payoff, although action fans may not agree, because that payoff is the equivalent of a Cheshire cat's grin.

If you like Redford, Spy Game will be a real treat: a fast electric thriller full of the old Sundance charm and pizzazz.

The film is brimming with plots, counterplots, dossiers, and sinister corrupt priorities, all held together by the telephoto obsidian gloss of Scott's look-ma-no-pauses style.

The movie asks tough, unflinching questions about America's responsibility to maintain world peace -- and the price we are willing to pay in order to accomplish that. Timely stuff, indeed.

Manages to be entertaining and reasonably exciting. Scott's style may be slick and tricky but, if this and his last film, "Enemy of the State," are any indication, he's lost the glossy sadism that characterized his previous work.

It's well-plotted, acted with a charismatic flair and right on the zeitgeist.

Fans of swooping helicopter shots, alleys filled with backlit geysers of steam, and jump-cut editing that makes MTV look like Ingmar Bergman will relish the intercontinental intrigue and huggermugger that is Spy Game.

Less Bond than simply boring, a tedious and overdirected race-against-time drama with a few espionage elements thrown in.