Chris Cooper as a shadowy FBI agent who must be taken down? Say it ain't so! Some actors are typecast for a reason, I guess, and there are few actors out there who play this type of role as well as he does but it's still funny to see him in essentially the same role over and over again. Ryan Philippe plays a mole trying to catch Cooper in this dramatized version of the Robert Hanssen case. I might add that he plays the role fairly well, definitely stronger than I imagined when I saw his name on the credits.
For some reason, stylistically this thing felt a lot like one of the better episodes of the West Wing or something throughout. Laura Linney is quite capable in her role as a handler for Philippe and plays very well off of him in their scenes together. Sometimes she's a little heavy-handed but for some reason I think she has this tendency in most of her roles. Dennis Haysbert also appears as one of Linney's colleagues on the investigative side of the operation.
A lot of the twists and turns in the story are a bit embellished but that's why this is a "dramatization" of events. At any rate, as far as an adaptation of the true story of one of the most infamous cases of a breach in U.S. intelligence goes this is an interesting film. It keeps the attention even if, in my opinion, it doesn't delve deep enough into what Hanssen actually did.
3 Cloak-and-Daggers out of 5
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