MOVIE REVIEW : It’s the Same Old ‘Business’ : Hackman, Baryshnikov Trapped in Spy Caper

“Company Business” (selected theaters) is a post- glasnost spy thriller by Nicholas Meyer, a writer-director who’s had fun in the past playing with old science-fiction and mystery genres in movies such as “Time After Time” or “Star Trek 2.” But Meyer doesn’t seem to be having much fun here. Like the characters in his spy-swap plot--Gene Hackman’s ex-CIA man, Sam Boyd, and Mikhail Baryshnikov’s KGB jailbird Pyotr Grushenko--he seems trapped in a system that won’t let him play. In a way, he’s working for the Company.

Spy movies, good or mediocre, used to have a certain exhilaration and verve. They may have dealt with the mistier sides of morality, with equivocal characters and motives, but there was always an air of suspense and glamour that carried them along: the thrill of a ride on the Orient Express or with James Bond on one of his Club Med missions.

Yet it’s one of the peculiarities of “Company Business”--a shallow pastiche about two tired old pros who have been thrust together outside the law--that it seems to be reaching for that old suspense and glamour, while also trying to tap into the bitter, skeptical air of new-style spy thrillers: the grayed-out world of John le Carre or the post-’70s anti-CIA movies.

It’s a thin movie with no real center. Most of the pleasure in watching it comes not from plot or characterization, but from looking at the backgrounds: Ken Adam’s tricky production designs or the views of Berlin’s subways and Paris’ Eiffel Tower, shot in that creamily distinct light favored by cinematographer Gerry Fisher (“The Go-Between”). There are jokes about East Germany’s Trabants (inept pseudo-Volvos) and occasional pungent interplay between the actors. But they’re all basically trapped in another buddy-buddy movie, trying for some European sophistication. In the end, there’s nothing really here beyond an attempt to dredge up sentiment for movies that had little sentiment to begin with, and were better when they had none. It’s as if Meyer were longing for the romance of the Cold War thrillers in a world whose grammar is derived from trailers and cosmetics commercials. There’s a conscious irony. The movie begins in a cosmetics factory, in a teaser scene that sets up Boyd as an industrial spy. If “Company Business” had continued in that vein, it might have mined some thrills and laughs out of the notion that the major espionage battles were to take place between corporations. But, in the end, it simply turns into another version of the post-1965 Western, all those movies where aging cowboys in or outside the law got together to battle against the new-style exploiters who were taking over the West.

It’s a shame, because a movie with Hackman and Baryshnikov, and Kurtwood Smith and Terry O’Quinn among the villains, plus good minor roles from Nadim Sawalha (as a sweating, ruined Arab entrepreneur) and Andreas Grothusen (as an ex-Nazi forger) really should be better than this. It should have more character, grit, tension and humor.

As CIA operative Elliot Jaffe, Smith knows how to register the amorality of men who see no percentage in compassion--but might, if it could be proved to them with fact sheets. Baryshnikov’s magical presence hasn’t faded. And Hackman can’t be faulted. He gives the same crinkle-eyed, whiny, expert performance he always manages, when his material isn’t too inspiring: the standard Hackman-to-the-rescue performance that’s gussied up many a thin-blooded post-1980 genre movie.

That’s the basic problem with “Company Business” (rated PG-13 for language and violence). It’s a movie that has to depend on service beyond the call of duty. It needs heroism from its actors to put across its half-imagined, anti-heroic world of cosmetic intrigues.

‘Company Business’

Gene Hackman: Sam Boyd

Mikhail Baryshnikov: Pyotr Grushenko

Kurtwood Smith: Elliot Jaffe

Terry O’Quinn: Col. Grissom

A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presentation of a Steven-Charles Jaffe production. Director-screenplay Nicholas Meyer. Producer Steven-Charles Jaffe. Cinematographer Gerry Fisher. Editor Ronald Roose. Costumes Yvonne Blake. Music Michael Kamen. Production design Ken Adam. Art director Albrecht Konrad. With Daniel Von Bargen, Geraldine Danon. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13 (violence, language).