AMERICAN paranoia feeds its movie industry, the superpower's biggest propaganda machine of all. So Roger Donaldson's The Recruit is a warning, a recruitment drive and a spy thriller wrapped inside a cautionary tale of flushing out the rotten apple from the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency is painted luridly as a nest of vipers, a secret world where double-crossing informants are out to topple the American administration. On the other hand, those vipers will be pursued to the end of beyond. Message: the CIA will prevail.

"Trust no one," advises leathery senior CIA operative Walter Burke (Al Pacino, as Al Pacino), upon recruiting young computer programming ace James Clayton (hot Irish property Colin Farrell). Good advice for the stubbled and troubled Clayton, and the audience too.

Burke had come on like a surrogate father for the disaffected Clayton, a loner still to resolve his father's disappearance. Now, however, he packs him off to the CIA's spy-training camp, the Farm.

Here the movie enters its recruitment advert phase with a series of trainee initiation and endurance tests. Over the four weeks, with advice and cajoling from Pacino's ornery, Machiavellian Burke, Farrell's Clayton is pushed ever closer to the edge and close to wily, foxy fellow trainee Layla (Bridget Moynahan). Could her seduction technique be another test?

Burke is pulling all the strings, meddling coldly with Clayton's mind before telling him there is a mole burrowing within the CIA operation. His mission: to eliminate the traitor and stop sensitive data being stolen.

At this point, The Recruit slows, loses its icy tension and slips into the facile comfort zone of Hollywood clich. Guess who is suspect number one: the girl with the name from the Clapton song.

Pacino has passed this paranoid way too many times before: heavy eyelids, the sandpaper rasp in his voice, weary as an old dog, as he laconically doles out gruff advice. Scent Of A Woman meets Insomnia. Farrell has a George Best twinkle but not a lot beneath the surface, Moynahan is instantly forgettable, and Donaldson's direction of his sprawling mind game is solid but devoid of spark.

Updated: 08:39 Friday, March 28, 2003