A tale of political intrigue complicated by romantic intrigue in Indochina in the early 1950s: an idealistic and myopic American secret agent played by Brendan Fraser, and an aloof, effete British journalist played by Michael Caine ("Sooner or later," he is admonished by a native, "one has to take sides if one is to remain human"), in gentlemanly -- and discreetly symbolic -- competition over a passive Vietnamese concubine. This treatment of the Graham Greene novel stays truer than Joe Mankiewicz's 1958 version to the spirit of the original, though it goes outside it in its godlike omniscience on the coming Vietnam War, complete with an historical update in the epilogue. More than a mere remake, more than a simple reprise, it amounts to a retrospective and newly appreciative view of the book, a validation of it in hindsight. (For all its distant perspective, the film has lost little in topicality: America is still the cop on the world beat.) Of course we can scarcely be surprised, in an age whose top spy writer seems to be Tom Clancy, that Greene would come across more than ever as a deep thinker and a subtle moralist: everyone in his smoke-gray world is tainted, and the man who holds the moral high ground in one sector of the battlefield will find himself far down the slope in another. Australian director Phillip Noyce, who coincidentally has handled a couple of the Clancy transplants to the screen (Patriot Games, the best of them, in addition to A Clear and Present Danger), keeps a steady hand on the throttle, such that the slightest infusion of suspense (running out of gas in the dead of night in the Vietnam back country and seeking refuge in the handiest watchtower) is worth more than all the explosions in the latest Bond caper. With Do Thi Hai Yen. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd