Critic Reviews
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Stylish, smart and energetic, “The Recruit” is involving, but fairly plain-spoken: Unlike series that generate technical and political gibberish until one’s mind clouds over, what happens over the eight episodes remains easy to follow, despite its intricate narrative track.
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The Recruit is a mostly silly show, but Centineo has more than enough charm to carry viewers through the more absurd parts of the season’s ongoing plot, and there are enough veteran actors in the supporting cast to make us think the comedy-thriller tone of the first episode will be able to be sustained for the entire season.
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The Recruit is action-packed, filled with twists and turns, has a clever and snarky sense of humor, and is convoluted to a fault, but that's one of the main reasons why it grabs your attention.
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Flashy, funny and action-packed, “The Recruit” is a slick confection that pulls off the difficult feat of juggling a multi-plot, twist-filled, globetrotting storyline that careens all over the place and yet is relatively easy and quite fun to follow.
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It’s a potentially star-making performance from an actor [Noah Centineo] we’ll be seeing more. A combination workplace comedy/espionage thriller, “The Recruit” zips along from place to place (Vienna, Phoenix, Langley), leaving blithe spirits and dead bodies in its wake.
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[Noah Centineo] confidently leads a spotty but overall impressive spy romp that’ll make for a suitable holiday season watch.
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Overall, The Recruit is certainly a fun ride with some great action and an interesting story. But it’s unpolished, and could benefit from better dialogue and more nuanced relationships between characters.
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Too much of “The Recruit” feels as if it’s on autopilot. The action, bombastic and violent, begins to run together, used as it is to juice interest somewhat at random. ... Give “The Recruit” this much — it ends with a nicely-done cliffhanger, elegantly seeded over the course of the season’s run.
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[Owen's] an engine for the show’s plot to move forward, for us to skip recaps and watch episode after episode to see what happens. One just wishes there was more to this spy drama than cheap thrills wrapped around a pretty boy who keeps failing upward (and into the wrong hands, over and over again).
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"The Recruit" is far too amused with its wordiness in sharing the stuff that happens between cubicles at Langley, and it kills what little momentum the series gathers.
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Granted, good spies and reliable attorneys can be hard to find, especially when trying to wrap both vocations into one. But as The Recruit inadvertently reminds us, good TV series are too.
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In sum, watching The Recruit is like watching a blank avatar run around in a video game for eight hours. Or a poorly written version of Barry. The show is too focused on the complicated (but boring) puzzle it's created for its protagonist that fails to create fascinating inner lives or dynamics between the people involved.
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Whatever cutting satire or righteous anger The Recruit might have to offer is badly diluted over eight bloated hours — lost amid paper-thin characters, flimsy twists and a wishy-washy tone. What it turns out instead is a piece of content so forgettable, the CIA wouldn’t have to lift a finger to disappear it from public memory.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 20
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Mixed: 10 out of 20
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Negative: 2 out of 20
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Dec 18, 2022Its amazing how bad the writing is in modern shows. This one is cringe inducing and feels like it was written in an 8th grade drama class.
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May 14, 2023
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Mar 21, 2023