It's a downright despicable dirty and deadly business, but someone's got to do it!

Rating: 5/10 (10 February 2007)

***SPOILERS*** Confusing story about the founding of the CIA through the eyes of one of it's founding fathers head of counter-intelligence Edward Bell Wilson, Matt Damon. Getting everything ready for the big assault on Castro's Cuba the meticulously planned attack goes haywire as some 1,500 Cuban exiles and dozens of American mercenaries are caught flat footed and routed by Castro's army and home militia in the swamps and beaches off the infamous "Bay of Pigs".
Feeling that their operation, CIA code name Zapata, was compromised by someone higher up in the chain of leadership and it would result in the dismantling of the agency, by an outraged and embarrassed President John F. Kennedy,a piece of information gets delivered to Wilson's home. An envelope containing an audio tape and grainy photo of a couple making out in a hotel room. In that tape and photo is the person, a CIA man, who compromised the "Bay of Pigs" assault. Also in photo is the communist spy who delivered that vital information, via the Soviet Union's KGB, to Castro.
As Edward Wilson and his team of CIA electronic and film specialists mill over the tape and photo we get a number of flashbacks of his life in the CIA that started back in 1939. We see the 20 year-old Edward as a student at Yale joining the super secretive Skull & Bones Society. Edward was recruited, like many other Bonesmen, by General Bill Sullivan, Robert De Niro,to serve his country in war as well as peacetime as an undercover spy. Edward's social life as a Bonesman is upended when he's gotten drunk at a Skull & Bones party gathering at Deer Island. It's there where he's seduced by a hot to trot Clover Russell, Angelina Jolie, Edwards best friend and fellow bones-man John Russell, Gabriel Macht, horny sister.
Edwards who was having an affair with hearing impaired Laura, Tammy Blanchard, had to cut it short when he found out, from her brother John, that Clover was pregnant and was forced into a shotgun wedding. In the end that not only resulted in the birth of his one and only child Edward Jr,Eddie Redmayne, but also his driving Clover, now calling herself Margaret, almost to a nervous breakdown. This all happened some 18 years later when he met, at a play, and rekindled his relationship with Laura.
By the film jumping from the "Bay of Pigs" fiasco to Edward's past in his rise in the CIA you start to lose your footing getting a feeling of lost time as you can't differentiate between the past and the present. Theresalso the fact that Edward Wilson never seems to change looking like he hasn't aged at all in over 22 years. We get to see a number of double-crosses assassinations and regime changes that Edward was involved in over the years. His biggest boner, from this Bonesman and CIA chief, being his allowing a KBG operative Valentin Mironov, John Session, to get asylum in the US and having him feed the CIA false information in what, the then almost unknown, Fidel Castro was really all about. The US ended up giving Castro military equipment to overthrow the Betista regime in Havana only to have it be replaced with a Soviet satellite just 90 miles off the coast of Key West Florida!
We later find out that this KGB agent Mironov, code name Cold, was probably one of two Soviet spies, with the unknown woman in the grimly photo being the other, who tipped off the Cuban Communists about the "Bay of Pigs" invasion! When the truth comes out about another KGB agent, Mark Ivanir, also calling himself Mironov who gave himself up to the CIA in order to get asylum. Instead of being debriefed Mironov II was brutally beaten and tortured, by the gleeful and sadistic CIA investigator Ray Brocco ,John Torturro. Mironov II going completely wacko from what he was put through jumps out a ten story window killing himself. It turned that this Mironov was the real deal not the Mironov working with the CIA all these years. In the end this goof-up not only got Edward in hot water with his superiors the President and CIA Director but also his son Edward Jr as well. Edward Jr while taking a bath overheard pop planning the attack with a number of his CIA friends. Edward Jr later ended up spilling what he knew as he was making out with his girlfriend Miriam, Liya Kebede, the woman in both the mysterious tape and photo that Edward Sr received. It turned out that it was Edward Jr who was responsible for the disastrous "Bay of Pigs" invasion. The photo, and audio tape, that Edward mysterious got was to have him blackmailed by the KBG into doing it's bidding by selling out his country.
Very hard to follow spy film with people popping up and then disappearing so fast that you don't even have time to get their names much less find out what their doing in the movie in the first place. The film has a mindless and unbelievable ending that tries to make everything, that you saw up until them, look good for the very dull and almost asleep Edward Wilson It does that by having him not have to turn in Jr for his stupidity in letting the cat, the assault on Castro's Cuba, out of the bag. Yet at the same time have him break up a secret KGB ring inside the CIA that he, together with that vicious thug Brocco, brainlessly allowed to infiltrate!