Spy Game is a new mass-market espionage thriller starring Robert Redford as a CIA agent on the verge of retirement and Brad Pitt as his rogue protégé. Pitt has gone and gotten himself in a jam, Chinese prison-style, and Redford has only 24 hours (coincidentally, his final day at the office) to contrive a way to free Pitt. This task is complicated by the facts that (a) the bosses want to cut the kid loose, (b) his incarceration could become a sticky international incident, and (c) Redford can't really leave the building. What follows is a lot of phone calls, a bit of subterfuge, and a busload of flashbacks that allow Redford and Pitt to share the screen.

Despite a number of crowd-pleasing moments--Mr. Redford is in charmingly smug mode, and Brad Pitt is served up just the way I like him: in chains, mullet-headed, his face beaten to a pulpy maw--Spy Game is a big nothing of a movie. Director Tony Scott's trademark visual inflections, such as the recurring TV freeze-frame that lets us know how much time Redford has left to secure Pitt's rescue, are like billboards announcing his lack of interest in the movie he's making. He's so eager to stimulate that he doesn't seem to notice all the fine character actors (Marianne Jean Baptiste, Stephen Dillane) he has at his disposal. But what else can you expect from Tony Scott? Squandering talent is his métier.

What's worse is that Spy Game builds on a clay-footed premise. That Redford's character, a Machiavellian cipher who has spent his career killing and duping in the name of freedom, suddenly has a conscience pang and risks all to save Pitt is fair enough movie territory. But to cast him in the role of anti-authority figure, inveigling against the hypocrisy of the CIA bosses (who are no worse, we learn, than Redford's character), is downright disingenuous, and represents the new brand of pander that Hollywood and Washington alike are embracing: making heroes out of fools and charlatans.