This is interesting: The two men responsible for Brad Pitt’s fame are Ridley Scott and Robert Redford. It was Scott who cast Pitt as the blonde bombshell who tempts Thelma and Louise in, duh, Thelma & Louise. Redford came along and gave Pitt one of his first leading roles in A River Runs Through It. It’s been almost ten years since then, and now Redford and Pitt are finally on screen together in a film directed by Ridley’s brother, Tony.
Robert Redford, looking older than water, plays Nathan Muir, an experienced CIA agent who is on his last day on the job. He’s all set to turn in his stuff and go to the Bahamas to enjoy his last years on earth, when he gets wind of some bad news. Tom Bishop, the man he trained into a great undercover agent, got arrested in China on a non-sponsored CIA operation and is being held hostage for espionage, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Relations between the United States and China are not too good, and the CIA is looking for any reason to just let Bishop rot. So they call up Muir to clue them in on why Bishop turned rogue, and Muir offers his story on how he recruited and trained Bishop through a series of flashbacks.
Now usually, when a movie is told in flashbacks, it’s just a cheap gimmick to give unnecessary back story, but here it works. The flashbacks are filmed well and they clue us in to Muir and Bishop’s teacher/student relationship. Muir teaches his young prot