ENEMY OF THE STATE (60)

Directed by: Tony Scott

Starring: Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Tom Sizemore, Lisa Bonet

The Pitch: A young lawyer unknowingly has in his possession a politically explosive video disc, and gets his life systematically destroyed by the all-powerful National Security Agency.

Theo Sez: Say what you like about Jerry Bruckheimer, but he makes superior hokum - and whoever does his casting, here as in CON AIR and ARMAGEDDON, deserves some kind of special Oscar : the inclusion of Gabriel Byrne and Loren Dean in a film about the "surveillance society" suggests merely (though it's no mean feat) that someone stayed awake throughout THE END OF VIOLENCE, but the casting of snarky teenage types (Seth Green, Jamie Kennedy) as the people doing the surveillance is a masterstroke, bringing an irresistible suggestion of 90s video-game to the callous mapping of our hero's destruction and generally shaking the Kafka cobwebs out of what might've been unduly portentous (as in THE SIEGE, with its very similar theme of civil liberties eroded in the name of fighting "terrorism"). As a film, one might say it does the crude things subtly and vice versa - those of us able to appreciate echoes of THE CONVERSATION didn't really need the replication of its famous overhead shot looking down onto the plaza, but those of us reared on by-the-numbers action movies may be pleasantly intrigued by the old-fashioned structure (NORTH BY NORTHWEST redux) and healthy ratio of plot to pyrotechnics ; it often seems to be straining for cleverness, but at least it's trying - even the hilariously unlikely ending (our hero gets all his enemies together and arranges it so everyone's talking at cross-purposes, like an Abbott and Costello routine - the kind of ruse, you suspect, that would work for all of about five seconds in real life) is at least more fun than yet another action climax. Peripheral pleasures include watching Smith, ever the smoothie, manoeuvre himself from his irreverent Fresh Prince image to a rather square (but more durable) Regular Guy persona, and wondering whether there's a comment on Society's hidden racism in his character's slide from apolitical buppie to outcast black man pursued by whites ; plus of course taking bets on which crag-faced goon hovering in the background is Barry Pepper, and which in fact Jake Busey.