This Cloak-and-Dagger Story Is an Overt Operation

“Spy Game” is nakedly a star vehicle, but what kind of vehicle might that be? The sleek Rolls-Royce of studio dreams or the bedraggled Yugo of viewer reality? Big names Robert Redford and Brad Pitt are above the title, but what is going on under the hood?

What “Spy Game” turns out to be is the old reliable family car spruced up around the edges in an attempt to convince a new generation of buyers that it’s a hot number. While people may or may not be fooled by this standard tale of skulduggery inside the Central Intelligence Agency, that’s not due to any lack of effort from director Tony Scott.

A former commercial maker (though that fact is no longer in his bio), Scott is a shooter, someone who knows how to make a film’s action move along briskly. He never seems happier than when he can orchestrate elaborate set pieces, using, for instance, a helicopter and an aerial camera system to bring pizazz to a dialogue sequence on a tiny rooftop high above a city.

But without a facility for dialogue, Scott is limited by the strength of his script and his casting. When they’re good, viable pictures such as “Crimson Tide” and “Enemy of the State” result; when they’re indifferent, there’s only so much that can be done to deal with how little of abiding interest is going on.

Scripted by Michael Frost Beckner (the woebegone “Cutthroat Island”) and David Arata (“Brokedown Palace”), “Spy Game” details a crisis in the lives of veteran spook Nathan Muir (Redford) and his young protege Tom Bishop (Pitt). Saddled with fake wised-up dialogue of the “you’re gonna make a beautiful corpse” variety, the film is also hampered by its fragmented narrative line and miscalculations involving that high-profile casting.

Set in 1991, “Spy Game” opens with perhaps its best sequence, in which a cool Bishop, disguised as an American aid worker, breaks into a nasty Chinese prison in the hopes of breaking someone else out. But even a peerless, nerveless operative doesn’t win them all, and the next thing we know Muir gets an early-morning call telling him that the Chinese have arrested Bishop for espionage. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s just a week before our president is scheduled to make a key state visit.

It’s Muir’s last day at the agency after 30 years of keeping the world safe for democracy. The man is so old-school he wears a trench coat, drives a Porsche, drinks no Scotch younger than 12 years and calls cigarettes “smokes.” He can also, no surprise, outsmart the soulless corporate buffoons who now run things at Langley without breaking a sweat.

Those soulless buffoons, led by icy bureaucrat Charles Harker (a fine Stephen Dillane), have plans for Muir’s final day, and they don’t include ice cream and cake. They want to debrief him about Bishop, an agent he used to run, as they try to decide whether the younger man should be rescued or left to rot.

That strategy mandates a trio of extensive flashbacks. These detail how the two men first worked together in Vietnam in 1975, how Muir recruited his younger colleague into the agency a year later in West Berlin, and the troubles that marked the last time they worked together. That would be Beirut, 1985, when the presence of fetching aid worker Elizabeth Hadley (Catherine McCormack) complicates Bishop’s life.

If it weren’t for those sequences, Pitt, whose character is currently fully occupied being beaten senseless in that Chinese prison, would hardly have any screen time. Still, those flashbacks tend to dissipate tension and interest rather than increase it, making “Spy Game” play more like a haphazard short-story collection than an involving and cohesive novel.

Also problematical is the film’s glamorous casting. Not the Pitt part: He has some nice movie star moments and continues to look good with his shirt off. Redford, however, has less success with his role as the old warhorse about to fade away into a Caribbean sunset.

For one thing, making Muir a decade and more younger, as the flashbacks demand, turns out to be surprisingly difficult; darkening Redford’s sideburns just doesn’t do enough.

For another, though it’s true that Redford, in producer Douglas Wick’s words, “is one of those actors who always looks like he has a secret,” he never looks like it’s a secret worth knowing. Yes, he’s opaque as an actor, but it’s the opaqueness of a Western rancher who doesn’t talk much rather than the dangerous, coldblooded opaqueness of a master spy.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about “Spy Game” is the way it plays differently after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. It’s a relic of a time when films could show an Arab suicide car bomber without causing a special shudder in the audience. And it’s a survivor of those days when we really could believe that the CIA was an organization of supermen who carefully recruited the best and the brightest. Those days are gone, but films like “Spy Game” remain.

MPAA rating: R, for language, some violence and brief sensuality. Times guidelines: deadly explosions, firefights, assassinations and brutal beatings.

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‘Spy Game’

Robert Redford...Nathan Muir

Brad Pitt...Tom Bishop

Catherine McCormack...Elizabeth Hadley

Stephen Dillane...Charles Harker

Larry Bryggman...Troy Folger

Marianne Jean-Baptiste...Gladys Jennip

Beacon Pictures presents a Douglas Wick production, released by Universal. Director Tony Scott. Producers Douglas Wick, Marc Abraham. Executive producers Armyan Bernstein, Iain Smith, Thomas A. Bliss, James W. Skotchdopole. Screenplay Michael Frost Beckner and David Arata. Story by Michael Frost Beckner. Cinematographer Dan Mindel. Editor Christian Wagner. Costumes Louise Frogley. Music Harry Gregson-Williams. Production design Norris Spencer. Supervising art director Kevin Phipps. Set decorator Jille Azis. Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes.

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In general release.