Fair Game

The poster for Fair Game touts Doug Liman as “the director of The Bourne Identity,” but his latest spy film is much more focused on the dirty politics and domestic strains of the spy game than on the kicking and motorcycle chases. Based on the separate memoirs by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her ex-ambassador husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), Fair Game follows the story from their first involvement with intelligence gathering in Iraq through their public pariah-hood when her identity was maliciously leaked by the Bush administration. Liman keeps the story moving and the camera twitching, but Plame and Wilson are portrayed as such blank, pretty crusaders (and their children as mere distractions), they barely register as characters. As such, Fair Game feels more like a good deed than a good film.