Enemy of State

In the '70s Hollywood responded to Vietnam and Watergate with a series of marvelously tense political conspiracy thrillers. Films like The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, and Francis Coppola's masterful The Conversation reflected a new Orwellian age of wiretapping and surveillance. The new suspenser Enemy of the State attempts to hark back to this golden age of paranoid moviemaking, but without the timely context or sharp script. As concocted by producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Con Air, The Rock) and director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide), the film is just another hackneyed, high-concept action flick that's more "oh brother" than Big Brother. You can just imagine the studio pitch: Hey, let's catch up with bugger extraordinaire Harry Caul (Gene Hackman's character from The Conversation) 25 years later and team him with the Fresh Prince in a high-tech, low-stakes thriller. Enemy begins with the assassination of a U.S. congressman (Jason Robards in a wily cameo) hatched by Reynolds (Jon Voight), a stoic National Security Agency agent. It's all part of a dubious political cover-up regarding the passing of a new surveillance bill. Curiously, despite the fact that this murder was organized by masters in covert espionage, nobody planned on Zavitz (Chasing Amy's Jason Lee), an environmentalist who accidentally recorded the whole incident on tape. Realizing he's got the scoop of the century, he flees for his life with Reynolds' squadron of Urban Outfitted techno goons tracking his every move.

Enter hotshot D.C. labor lawyer Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), who bumps into old college classmate Zavitz while Christmas shopping for his wife. (In pure red-blooded Bruckheimer fashion, the backdrop is a male fantasy of a lingerie store—when was the last time your local Victoria's Secret bustled with leggy salesgirls frolicking in panties?) Not knowing he's been slipped the dangerous evidence, Dean finds himself a marked man, losing his family, his bank account, and his job. In a deadly race against time, Dean joins forces with Brill (Hackman) a reclusive, embittered ex-NSA agent who's only too happy to seek revenge on his former employers. In true Tony Scott fashion, Enemy of the State is visually slick. It features plenty of sped-up action montages and flashy spy-cam special effects, but there's not one organic moment of suspense. Part of the problem can be attributed to David Marconi's script, in which the villains are clearly established in the film's opening sequence, and there are virtually no turnabout-style surprises from that point on. Enemy is also too damn loud: Between explosions we're left with another mind-numbing score from former Yes rocker Trevor Rabin (Armageddon). Where are all the eerie "somebody's watching me" silences these kinds of films thrive on? Luckily, the performances are fairly strong. Smith fights his every urge to shtick it up and makes a credible hero, while the supporting cast of Gen X hackers (including Jake Busey, Scott Caan, a strangely uncredited Seth Green, and Saving Private Ryan's Barry Pepper) are suitably snotty. The film wastes its talented female leads: sassy, scene-stealer Regina King and the resurrected from straight-to-video hell Lisa Bonet, as Smith's wife and ex-girlfriend respectively. But Enemy of the State's biggest casting coup is Hackman as a nerdy, hypoglycemic shut-in who's just imbalanced enough to give this standard action outing the little bit of edge it otherwise sorely lacks.
--Kevin Maynard