Brad Pitt (Spy Game) Spy Game

Brad Pitt plays Tom Bishop — codename "Boy Scout" — the recruit Nathan Muir pulls out of Vietnam and builds into a CIA field operative, only to watch him break over the woman he is ordered to sacrifice. It is a curious kind of leading role: Pitt drives most of the film, but almost entirely inside Muir's flashbacks. In the present-day story he is a body in a Chinese cell, hours from a firing squad, while Robert Redford does the talking. The part reunited Pitt with the director who had first cast him as a star, and it landed in the middle of the biggest stretch of his career.

Redford had already turned Pitt into a star once, on A River Runs Through It

The pairing was not a coincidence of casting. Redford directed Pitt as Paul Maclean in A River Runs Through It (1992) — the film widely credited with converting Pitt from a promising young actor into a leading man — and Spy Game brought the two back together nearly a decade later, this time as co-stars, with Redford now playing the mentor to Pitt's protégé. (wikipedia, collider) Redford has described spotting Pitt's screen quality the moment he walked in to read.

"When he first came in, he had a look about him. I said, 'Yeah, you're looking at it. He's going to succeed.'" — Robert Redford, on first meeting Pitt, quoted in Yahoo Entertainment

That real-life history of director-and-discovery maps onto the Muir–Bishop relationship almost exactly, and reviewers reaching back to Spy Game have noted how deliberately the film leans on it.

"It was clearly meant to be a passing-of-the-torch moment between Redford and Pitt. That didn't pan out exactly, but the two still have remarkable chemistry, and the star power of each is no less diminished by proximity." — Code and Dagger, Retro Review: In Defense of 'Spy Game' (2018)

Bishop enters as a sniper and exits a captured man awaiting execution

Pitt's arc runs backward through Muir's memory across three theaters. Muir first meets Bishop in Vietnam in 1975, where he is a Marine Corps Scout Sniper with a confirmed record of kills; Muir recruits him and trains him in West Berlin in 1976; and their partnership finally fractures in Beirut in 1985, where Bishop — working under cover as a photojournalist — falls for the British relief worker Elizabeth Hadley. (wikipedia) The rupture is a moral one. Muir's central lesson is that assets are expendable and that no operative risks himself for a person; Bishop cannot live inside that rule, and by 1991 he has gotten himself captured at Su Chou prison in China trying to save Hadley, awaiting execution at 8:00 a.m. unless the Agency intervenes. (collider)

The character was built as the conscience of the film — the idealist against Muir's cold pragmatism — and that friction is what Pitt was asked to play.

"Brad Pitt is a perfect foil for Redford, playing the young, skeptical, conflicted sniper-turned-CIA-assassin against Redford's self-assured mentor." — Behind the Curtain, Spy Game (2001) Review

"Pitt keeps you guessing at key junctures when you see his better intentions fighting against the orders he's obligated to dispassionately execute." — Behind the Curtain, Spy Game (2001) Review

Redford and Pitt share almost no present-day screen time, so the bond lives in flashback

The structural oddity of the film is that its two stars barely occupy the same room. The 1991 frame keeps Redford at Langley, talking; Pitt is elsewhere and mostly earlier, glimpsed in the orange, blue, and sandy-gold flashbacks Tony Scott color-codes to Vietnam, Berlin, and Beirut. Contemporary and later critics both flagged that the marquee duo really only meet in memory.

"While it's also fun to see him paired with the man he made a star in his 'A River Runs Through It,' Redford and Pitt only appear together in flashbacks." — Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Because the relationship is delivered in fragments — a recruitment, a lesson, a mission, a falling-out — Pitt's job was to establish the whole trajectory of a man in disconnected pieces, each in a different decade and a different palette.

"Each of these movies-within-the-movie are actually solid short films, but between these stories there are coffee breaks, food is served and people pause to take phone calls." — Code and Dagger, Retro Review: In Defense of 'Spy Game' (2018)

In 2001 Pitt bracketed a serious spy with a caper

Spy Game arrived at a peak year. It opened in the United States on November 21, 2001, on a $115 million budget, and went on to gross roughly $143 million worldwide; barely two weeks later, on December 7, 2001, Pitt was back in theaters as Rusty Ryan in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven. (wikipedia-spygame, history) The two roles are a study in contrast — the wounded idealist of the Tony Scott thriller and the loose, wisecracking thief of the caper — and they sat side by side on the December marquee.

Critics split on whether the role gave Pitt enough to play

Reviewers largely agreed the film belonged to Redford, and divided over whether Pitt was underserved by the script or simply outmatched by his co-star. The most generous read him as a solid presence.

"Pitt holds his own, but this is Redford's film all the way." — Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

"Pitt provides the physical presence required of Tom Bishop, but I prefer the megastar in smaller, supporting roles where he can really shine." — Robin Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Others put the blame on the screenplay rather than the star, arguing the rapid-cut structure left no oxygen for a character.

"The script does not have room for character development, and so, we have very little." — Mark Dujsik, Mark Reviews Movies

The harshest verdict came from Salon's Charles Taylor, who found no interior life beneath Pitt's surface — and, tellingly, pointed to the very moment the film uses to establish Bishop's conscience.

"When a man recruited for a mission asks Pitt if it hurts to take a human life, there's no remorse or bitterness or guilt in Pitt when he tells the man 'yes.'" — Charles Taylor, Salon (2001)

Even so, the consensus that has hardened around the film treats the pairing itself as the reason to watch — two generations of movie-star cool, one training the other, even when they are never quite in the frame together.

"Spy Game wouldn't work as well as it does without Redford and Pitt, as the two's dynamic is the beating heart of the movie." — Collider, Brad Pitt and Robert Redford Joined Forces for This Gripping Spy Thriller