The Recruit is a spy thriller movie starring Colin Farrell, Al Pacino and Bridget Moynahan. It was released in 2003. It follows the career of a recent MIT graduate recruited into the CIA.

Plot

James Clayton (Colin Farrell), a brilliant computer science college student, is recruited by CIA officer Walter Burke (Al Pacino) to serve his country. James quickly appears as one of the best of his group and falls in love with Layla (Bridget Moynahan), another CIA recruit. Filled with doubts about his role and the relation with his mentor, Clayton is asked by Burke to accomplish a risky mission: find a mole in the CIA headquarters in Langley. James now fully realizes that no one can be trusted anymore and that nothing is what it seems.

The film begins with several flashes of James’ internet homepage in which he constantly trawls for information about his father, who presumably had gone missing when Clayton was quite young. In the first scene James wakes up in his shared student apartment to the sounds of the telephone ringing. Upon answering it, somewhat reluctantly, he realizes that he had forgotten about, and is now late for, the MIT graduate recruitment careers fair. His delinquency is important because, of a group of graduating students, he is the one that possesses the disk that holds their project, a rather impressive program that turns computer terminals to which it is networked into its slave.