A Really Quick Non-Review

In "The Recruit," Colin Farrell plays James Clayton, a computer programmer recently graduated from MIT, whose software skills bring him to the attention of the CIA in the person of Walter Burke (Al Pacino).  After acquiring one particularly useful program from Clayton, Burke decides the Company can't pass up a talent like his and recruits him.  At least it appears that is Burke's reason for enticing Clayton to join.  Clayton's reason for joining is that his father died in Peru in 1990 under circumstances peculiar enough to make Clayton wonder if his dad was a CIA officer.

After completing most of his training, Clayton decides he doesn't want to be part of the CIA, but he is pulled back in by the urgent need to uncover a traitor lest he be tagged as one himself.  The closing sequence in which he accomplishes this is the movie's justification, but the second act (at the CIA's Virginia training facility, the Farm) didn't seem to promise anything like it, so I switched away and came back only for the last 10 minutes.  I might normally praise a movie for building up slowly to an intense ending, but it just wasn't what I was in the mood for last Sunday morning, so I limit it to three stars.