Great minds...

Mark Steyn

The Recruit

/24, selected cinemas

This column gets results! Well, to be more precise, after decades of impotence, this column has got a result! Or, at any rate, the possibility of a result.

On 1 April 2000, in my post-Oscars round-up, I wrote:

Aside from Michael Caine, who was at least human, most of the other winners just read out lists of names, which is the equivalent of a box of Kwikkie Krapola breakfast cereal thanking his E-numbers. Why can't the Academy just tell these butt-numbing yawnmongers that all the people they want to thank will be listed on the official website but that they have to use their 45 seconds on TV to say something else?

Much as I hate to admit it, your majorleague Hollywood muscle doesn't spend a lot of time reading The Spectator. But they do read Roger Ebert, dean of American film critics, and a couple of months later, responding to queries about how to make the Oscars 'less of a snore-fest', the great man wrote: 'Nothing can be done, I would have said, and eventually the Oscarcast will run all night, like a talk show. But then the mail from London brought The Spectator, and in it I found a brilliant suggestion by Mark Steyn.' The great Ebert heartily endorsed my website idea, and added. 'Among its other virtues, it would provide a test of whether the winners have 45 seconds' worth of anything to say.'

And now Gil Cates, producer of the Academy Awards, has belatedly signed on to the notion, Sunday night will be a Hollywood landmark: the first no-name Oscars. 'This excessive name pandering really began relatively recently, in the past 15 years,' he told the Associated Press. 'It's like a rampant disease.' He was particularly miffed by Jon Landau, who won the Best Picture Oscar for Titanic and thanked at least 45 individuals in his acceptance 'speech'. 'I wanted to blow my brains out,' said Cates.

So this year the Oscars will enforce two rules:

No. 1: 'If you pull out a piece of paper and start to read a list of names, you're done.'

No. 2: 'Even if you don't pull out a piece of paper, you get to name five names. . You start on a sixth name, you're done.'

Don't worry, says Gil. The full list of thank-y-ous to Harvey, Jeffrey, Hans, Dominique and Tariq at MiraWorks will be posted to the website. I'm sure Gil would have thanked me for the awesomeness of my concept, but the band would have struck up his exit music.

Will it work? I hope so. If ever there were an Oscars where we want the full range of Hollywood goofiness on display, it's this one. C'mon. guys, this is your big chance to tell the world 'Bush isn't my President', 'War is never the answer' and 'Say what you like, but Saddam's healthcare system is excellent-. Go for it!

Meanwhile, The Recruit provides us with a small example of why Hollywood is not the most illuminating

guide to the great issues of the day. This is a film supposedly about the CIA. In reality, it's the umpteenth vehicle for Al Pacino to do his mentoring routine with some upand-corner. If you loved it in Donnie Brasco and Scent Of A Woman, you'll adore it here — he's got a goatee and a silly voice and he's chewing up the scenery, this time not with Johnny Depp or Keanu Reeves but with young Colin Farrell.

Nonetheless, while the Pacino crazy oldtimer act has unlimited application, the fact remains that the makers of this movie have chosen to apply it to the CIA. There is a range of views one can have on the Agency: on the one hand, they screwed up badly before September 11th: on the other, they've been very cunning in the months since at shifting most of the blame on to the FBI; on the other other hand, CIA man Mike Spann was the first American to die in Afghanistan, when the captured Taleban prisoners rose up and bit him to death; and. as I write, CIA guys are already operating in Iraq. The Recruit, by contrast, isn't pro-CIA or anti-CIA. Indeed, it all but advertises its total lack of interest in the Agency even as the film is chugging along.

The first half is set at a spook boot camp in Virginia, where grizzled ol' Pacino is putting young Farrell and co. through their paces. They get to do exercises like go into a bar and, within the time limit, return to the parking lot with someone willing to have sex with you. That sounds less like CIA training, and more like training for a bad reality TV show, or a video for 'How To Be A Hollywood Action Star'. Granted, Roger Donaldson, the amiable Aussie director, demonstrated a similar lack of interest in the realities of Pentagon politics in his 1987 thriller No Way Out. But he was working with a lean, mean script that was genuinely thrilling and had a real sting in the tail. Here, the story is bunk, and the effects — the chases and explosions — look more threadbare than ever because they're not rooted even in a movieland reality of what the CIA is. It's not just that it's sillier than what Mike Spann did, but that it's a lot duller.