Sundance Review: Paul Rudd is Recruited to Be an Assassin in THE CATCHER WAS A SPY
Paul Rudd takes on one of the most dramatic roles in his career in his upcoming film The Catcher Was a Spy. I’m a big fan of Paul Rudd and he always tends to make interesting and good films with humor. This movie is definitely a departure from what we are used to seeing from Rudd, but he does a great job in it.
The movie is set during World War II and Rudd plays a major league baseball player named Moe Berg, who was a catcher for the Red Sox. It's based on the true story of how he was recruited by the government to assassinate a German scientist named Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong) who the government believes is developing an atomic weapon for Nazi Germany and they want to stop him.
Before Moe Berg was recruited by the Office of Security Services (the precursor to the CIA), he was a catcher, a Jewish Ivy League graduate who spoke nine languages and was also a regular guest on a popular TV quiz show.
It was interesting seeing Rudd in such a different role, but he owned it and was really quite charming. He fit this character so well and I wonder if we’ll start seeing him do more dramatic stuff like this after this movie is released.
I do have to say that the movie was pretty slow and kind of a dull political thriller, but there were certain aspects of the story and the life of this man that kept me interested.
The film is based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 biography, The Catcher Was a Spy and the script was adapted by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan). Ben Lewin (The Sessions) directed the film. The movie also stars Jeff Daniels and Guy Pearce as seasoned spies and Paul Giamatti as a Dutch physicist.
If you want to see Paul Rudd doing something different from anything that he's done before, watch him go from a baseball player to a spy hired to assassinate a German scientist in The Catcher Was a Spy.
