The Recruit

The Recruit is a 2003 American spy thriller film, directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, and Bridget Moynahan. James Clayton is a prodigious programmer studying nonlinear cryptography at MIT, collaborating with a group of peers to create Spartacus, a surveillance program that can enslave any computer's audiovisual hardware to the master computer via the internet. His group showcases the software to Dell at a campus fair drawing substantial interest in its uses. Later at his night job, James is approached by Walter Burke, a man who claims to have known James’ deceased father and suggests he works for the Central Intelligence Agency. After a pitch to recruit James into the agency, James initially declines until he reconsiders it as an opportunity to get answers to his father's mysterious plane crash in Peru several years earlier. James passes the initial security screening and is bussed with the rest of his class to The Farm in rural Virginia where they undergo training as potential operatives. While there, James develops an attraction to Layla Moore and a rivalry with Zack who is James’ competition for top of the class. One night during a training exercise in which James and Layla are paired together to tail a mark, they are abducted by masked assailants and imprisoned where they are tortured psychologically and physically for several days. Their interrogators wish to know what happens at The Farm and the names of those who teach there. After resisting for days, James breaks when he's told about Layla's brutal treatment. He reveals Burke's name, at which point it's revealed that the whole experience was part of the exercise that the class was observing, including Layla, and that James failed by breaking. He is then dismissed from The Farm and the Agency. Later, Burke seeks out a despondent James and informs him that his discharge was part of a cover story because he's been selected as a non-official cover operative, or “NOC”. He gives James a low-level data entry position at the Agency so he can get close to Layla who has graduated from the Farm and now holds a desk position higher in the Agency than James. Burke explains that Layla is suspected of working with foreign agents to steal CIA secrets, specifically a highly sensitive computer virus called "ICE-9" because it transmits via the electrical grid rather than telecommunications and is easily capable of disabling all electrical devices on the planet instantly, thus behaving similarly to the particle from the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat's Cradle. James reunites with Layla and the two begin a romantic relationship. While staying overnight at her home, he checks her laptop for evidence of her crimes and she plants a bug on the lapel of his winter coat. Later, he witnesses her making a dead drop at Union Station, and follows the mysterious agent who retrieves what Layla left behind. The two end up in a shootout on the train tracks and the agent, who is revealed to be Zack, is killed. Believing both of them to be traitors, James confronts Layla who tells him that Zack was the NOC, not him, and that she was tasked with assessing the security protocols of the CIA headquarters because it was feared that someone else was stealing CIA material. James then goes to a meet with Burke wherein he confronts Burke about what's really happening. Burke claims that Zack's death was faked, that the gun Burke gave James is loaded with non-lethal ammunition, and that everyone is intending to rendezvous for debrief momentarily. However, Burke catches James off guard and shoots at him, narrowly missing him but blowing out the rear window of his vehicle in the process, proving that the gun was in fact loaded with live ammunition and therefore Zack is indeed dead.