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Weather.... Published: Friday, 1/31/2003  The Recruit: Pacino a
teacher of the spy game   Forget Scarface, Michael Corleone,
Frank Serpico. Just as the swaggering menace of Robert De Niro
morphed over 20 years into a De Niro parody of swaggering
menace, Al Pacino is no longer America's favorite loose cannon
with an electric shock of hair-trigger temper.  Pacino has
become our postmodern Jiminy Cricket, a scruffy mentor figure in
movies who gives world-weary advice in an exhausted drawl that
steadily increases in volume until he's reached his barking
point and we're left cowering.  Like De Niro, he is still given
to occasionally breaking this mold and surprising us; I thought
his lethargic amoral detective in Insomnia, and his prototypical
workaholic in Heat are two of his finest and least appreciated
roles. In his new CIA thriller The Recruit, he's smack in the
middle.  Pacino plays Walter Burke, a legendary CIA spook who
knows “all the secrets.” He