SPY GAME []

James Bond and the Sundance Kid. Running time: 123 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity). At the Empire, the Lincoln Square, the Loews Village, others.

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DON’T you hate movies where one character is so much smarter than everyone else? That’s only one problem with “Spy Game,” a glossy, suffocatingly predictable star vehicle for Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.

Pitt plays Tom Bishop, a hotshot CIA operative who’s captured trying to extract a prisoner from a Chinese prison.

Tom’s mentor, 30-year company man Nathan Muir (Redford), is arriving for his very last day on the job at CIA Headquarters in Virginia when he learns his protégé is facing execution within 24 hours.

Nathan, who’s not always been a team player, faces a tough grilling from his soon-to-be ex-bosses. It seems the CIA wants to get rid of Tom, who was pursuing an unauthorized mission, because acknowledging him would screw up an impending presidential visit to China.

Nathan has to (a) keep the brass from getting information on Tom that would justify abandoning him and (b) organize his own covert rescue operation, funded by his own 401k plan, under his bosses’ noses.

Doing this in the space of the day might seem a recipe for a suspenseful movie – if Nathan’s bosses, personified by a petty bureaucrat (Stephen Dillane) and a cynical veteran (Larry Byrggman ), didn’t act like oblivious idiots as the brilliant Nathan schemes, steals files and generally has the run of the joint.

Though we have the ritual reminders of time ticking away, the tension is further dissipated by a series of lengthy flashbacks that director Tony Scott (“Crimson Tide”) stages with dogged professionalism.

The main action is set in 1991, but we go back as far as 1975, when Nathan (Redford looking no younger in sideburns) meets Tom as a young Army sniper in Vietnam.

Nathan recruits Tom later in Berlin and educates the younger man in moral relativity, including the need to sacrifice “contracts” (among them the still-ravishing Charlotte Rampling in a cameo appearance) for the greater good.

Tom is still struggling with this concept in mid-’80s Beirut, when Nathan questions his relationship with a beautiful aid worker (Catherine McCormick) who’s part of a plot to kill an Arab terrorist.

At this point, it’s only fair to warn jittery audiences that this episode includes the destruction of an entire block by a suicide car bomber.

Redford and Pitt (the former directed the latter in “A River Runs Through It” a decade ago) have relatively little screen time together, and no chemistry to speak of.

Nathan keeps telling us what a brilliant spy Tom is, but intelligence has never been something that Pitt has been particularly good at conveying – to put it mildly.

Redford, who made “Spy Game” before the vastly superior “The Last Castle,” dominates this expensive-looking two-hour slog with wry detachment – but it’s a long way from his classic “Three Days of the Condor.”

“Do you remember when we could tell the good guys from the bad guys?” Nathan asks in one of numerous cliched lines that pepper the script attributed to Michael Frost Bleckner and David Arata.

“All this was about something,” Nathan continues. And if “Spy Game” is about anything at all, it’s about making money.