Spy Game - The final countdown

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Movie
German title Spy Game - The final countdown
Original title Spy game
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 2001
length 121 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Tony Scott
script David Arata
Michael Frost Beckner
production Douglas Wick
Marc Abraham
music Harry Gregson-Williams
camera Daniel Mindel
cut Christian Wagner
occupation

Spy Game - The Final Countdown is a thriller from the year 2001 . Directed by Tony Scott and written by David Arata and Michael Frost Beckner . Robert Redford and Brad Pitt star as Nathan D. Muir and Tom Bishop.

action

Nathan D. Muir, an agent of the CIA , is in 1991, shortly before his retirement. On the last working day, he is supposed to give his superiors information about his former colleague Tom Bishop, who was arrested in China .

In flashbacks, tells how Muir much younger Bishop, a sniper of the US Marines in the Vietnam War came to know later recruited him as an agent and taught him many tricks. The two were first deployed in East Berlin , where they had to expose a mole in the US embassy .

Their next joint operations is an operation during the Lebanese civil war , where they put a stop to an Islamist leader should commit that especially for a medical examination by his personal physician with a speed boat from Cyprus will arrive. In Lebanon , Bishop meets British doctor Elizabeth Hadley and falls in love with her. Muir finds out, however, that Hadley is an internationally wanted terrorist who was involved in a bomb attack on the Chinese embassy in London , in which the nephew of the Chinese prime minister was killed, and therefore had to flee the UK. However, through Hadley, Bishop gets in touch with the personal physician of the attacked person and organizes a meeting with Muir. Muir presents the doctor with evidence that the death of his parents from carbon monoxide poisoning a few years ago was not an accident, but an assassination attempt by this Islamist leader, and can thus persuade the doctor to carry out a fatal poisoning attack on the target person during the upcoming examination.

Muir, who doesn't trust Hadley and also fears that the love affair between Bishop and Hadley could jeopardize their camouflage and thus the whole mission, threads a deal with the Chinese side, which is still interested in Hadley because of the London embassy attack: He reveals Hadley's whereabouts to the Chinese secret service in exchange for a US diplomat who was arrested as a spy by the Chinese. Hadley is kidnapped by Chinese agents and later imprisoned in a People's Liberation Army prison. Muir forges a letter from Hadley to Bishop that she has left him and the country.

Muir, who could not risk the Islamist leader leaving and going into hiding, had organized a suicide attack with the Lebanese militia with the Lebanese militia on the target with a car bomb in the event that the poisoning should fail. On the day of the planned medical examination of the target person, because of the chaotic conditions in the city caused by the civil war, Bishop is unable to get the doctor to the agreed examination date in time because of new fighting between hostile groups. When Bishop and the doctor are late, Muir triggers plan B over the phone. In the explosion, in addition to the Islamist leader, many bystanders and the doctor who has meanwhile arrived on site are killed. Bishop did not agree with Muir's approach, was transferred to another department and broke off contact with Muir.

Years later, Bishop finds out that Hadley was kidnapped by the Chinese and is being held in a Chinese prison. He is eventually arrested while trying to get her out of this prison and is due to be executed in 24 hours. The CIA could declare Bishop “one of us” and thereby obtain his release. The US side would then have to attribute to Bishop's action as an “unfriendly act”, and the CIA leadership fears diplomatic involvement in this case. In order not to jeopardize a trade agreement between the USA and China that is about to be concluded and which the US President will travel to China to sign, the leadership of the CIA decides to sacrifice Bishop, especially since he acted on his own.

Muir, who still feels responsible for Bishop and has a guilty conscience because Bishop only had to attempt to rescue Hadley because Muir had betrayed her to the Chinese, first tries to use the media to draw attention to Bishop. When this fails, he forges the signature of the CIA director under an order he has written to a team of the United States Navy SEALs to free Hadley and Bishop from prison. He used all of his savings through an old friend in Hong Kong to bribe employees of the local Chinese electricity company so that they would turn off the electricity for the time of the liberation action - he was acting against his own advice, which he gave his newly recruited agent Bishop once in the evening had given in a bar: He should put a cash reserve aside and never touch it for a contact person. He transfers the money to an account in the Cayman Islands .

Muir's superiors increasingly distrust him, check his phone calls and account transactions, and start asking questions about his suspicious international transfer made a few hours ago. Muir manages to convince them that he only wants to buy a piece of land in the Bahamas with his savings . The simultaneous military action to liberate Bishop and Hadley also succeeds. Bishop finally recognizes from the code name of the operation ("Dinner out", a fantasy name mentioned between Muir and Bishop for a private procurement of a birthday present) that it had been initiated by his former mentor.

Reviews

Nell Minow wrote on movies.yahoo.com that in the film the spies would not wear elegant jackets or drink martinis , but would use their brains. She praises the "marvelous" performances by Robert Redford and Brad Pitt and the direction by Tony Scott. Even Sascha Westphal in der Welt does not find it superficial composition, which the former commercial filmmaker Tony Scott is often accused of, but describes the film as an essay on the state of the United States after the Cold War .

In the film lexicon of TV Spielfilm , the film is referred to as “iconoclasm”, “in which the synapses cry out for help” and which prevents one from being able to follow the plot seriously. The " MTV- like over-staging" was also criticized , which makes the war scenes look like a " P. Diddy video" and turns the film into a "Scott-typical bombastic popcorn cinema hit". For Oliver Hüttmann in the mirror and AO Scott in The New York Times , the film is a visual barrage and reminiscent of a sports car - Advertising , in which only Robert Redford by its charismatic nature convinced.

Awards

The film was nominated for the Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel Award in two categories for sound effects.

Harry Gregson-Williams was nominated for the Golden Satellite Award for film music .

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating "valuable".

Gross profit

With production costs of 115 million US dollars of the film in the US played dollars 62.3 million and 143 million US dollars worldwide and is the ranking of US films in 2001 at No. 38. In Germany the film at 14 started. March 2002; it reached one million moviegoers, grossing around 5.5 million US dollars and also landed on 38th place in the German movie rankings in 2002.

Remarks

The Berlin exterior shots were shot in Budapest because Berlin had changed too much since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Budapest was better able to convey the atmosphere of Berlin during the Cold War. The exterior scenes in Lebanon, however, were actually shot there.

Director Scott dedicated the film to his mother Elizabeth Jean Scott, who died in 2001. His brother Ridley dedicated the war film Black Hawk Down to his mother .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Nell Minow: Spy Game. Common Sense Media, November 12, 2001, accessed January 6, 2019 .
  2. ^ Sascha Westphal : The Two: Robert Redford and Brad Pitt in Spy Game. Die Welt , March 14, 2002, accessed January 6, 2019 .
  3. ^ Film lexicon of TV feature films
  4. ↑ Oliver Hüttman: Espionage in a fast run. Der Spiegel , March 15, 2002, accessed January 6, 2019 .
  5. ^ AO Scott : Two spies test friendship as the Cold war thaws. The New York Times , November 21, 2001, accessed January 6, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Spy Game - The final countdown on fbw-filmbassy.com
  7. ↑ Spy Game . In: IMDb - The Internet Movie Database, accessed October 1, 2010
  8. ^ Spy game. Box Office Mojo , accessed January 6, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Top 100 Germany 2002. insidekino.de, accessed on January 6, 2019 .