Notorious spy Robert Hanssen is a mass of troubling contradictions. An unyielding sexual puritan, Hanssen gave naked pictures of his equally moralistic wife to a friend and maintained a prolonged, albeit strangely chaste, relationship with a stripper. A staunchly conservative anti-Communist, he sold secrets to the Soviet Union that led to the deaths of spies working for the U.S. A stern Catholic and outspokenly patriotic American, he aided and abetted a fiercely atheistic enemy nation. Master Spy writer Norman Mailer and director Lawrence Schiller–the team behind The Executioner's Song and the O.J. Simpson trial TV movie American Tragedy–are so fixated on Hanssen's contradictions that their biopic is little more than the sum of their subject's countless acts of hypocrisy. In one typically ham-fisted sequence, Hanssen (played by William Hurt) moralizes on the evils of strip clubs to embarrassed coworker Wayne Knight before heading to one himself. A sordid but remote TV movie, Master Spy follows its subject's slow but steady implosion as he uses his position as a brilliant but dull FBI analyst to peddle secrets to the KGB. The son of a bullying, abusive self-styled "warrior" (Peter Boyle), Hurt sees spying as a means of getting revenge on an agency that views him as a faceless bureaucrat. Spying for the Soviet Union allows Hurt to transcend the tedium of his job and become the romantic, virile man his father wants him to be. Unable to reconcile his lofty ideals with his raging demons, Hurt articulates his angst in fevered interior and solitary monologues that convey his tangled, conflicting emotions but come across as a distractingly artificial contrivance. In a performance that mirrors his turn in Monster's Ball, Boyle does what he can with a thankless role that plays like an overwrought parody of paternal brutishness. In the film's most over-the-top scene, Boyle swings his pre-pubescent son by his feet while yelling "Warriors don't lose!," a line that would no doubt serve as a camp catchphrase if Master Spy were ever to become a Mommie Dearest-like cult sensation. Ignoring the dictum to show rather than tell, Master Spy carefully constructs a motivation for each of Hanssen's paradoxes, making him seem more like a bloodless case study than a human being.
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