The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, R)
Directed by John McTiernan
Story by Alan Trustman
Screenplay by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary, Faye Dunnaway
As Reviewed by MovieKritic2000 (James Brundage)
Rene Russo finally did it. She finally gave up her antiquated morals and her idiotic ideals. She finally buckled under the pressure of the Hollywood system. Gentlemen, she finally signed a nudity clause.
Before multiple slanders such as "sexist pig" go through your mind, please remember that I am only trying to look on the bright side. You see, Rene Russo signing a nudity clause is about the only good aspect in The Thomas Crown Affair.
I think a rule is being drafted that anyone that played James Bond gets to play an anti-bond character in a thief movie. First we had Sean Connery in the highly entertaining, highly well plotted (also from a shlock director) Entrapment. Now we have Pierce Brosnan in the not entertaining, not well plotted, from a completely shlock director (John McTiernan, whose other movie being released in August, The 13th Warrior, has been delayed for over a year) in The Thomas Crown Affair.
Seeing as nudity clauses seem to be the only thing the film has going for it, the movie exploits them at every opportunity. It is a rare event that I call a movie exploitative, but, whenever a movie has absolutely no reason to show someone's breasts yet continues to do so, it is clear that it is highly aware that it has no other cards in its hand.
The mediocre cards that The Thomas Crown Affair also contains are a nice Jazz soundtrack, and a beginning and ending robbery scene that, were the rest of the movie the same, would make something good. It plays all three of them too quick, having each scene last a few seconds. In between this, we have the pseudo sex appeal of Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, which, despite an R-rating, don't hold a candle to the sex appeal that Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones so expertly held over their captive audiences.
The reason I address sex appeal and other unintelligent matters in this review, rather than going on my normal intellectual diatribe, is because The Thomas Crown Affair has so little in the way of plot that it is barely worth mentioning. It tries to be both a romance and a crime movie, fails at being both, and follows the formula boy-steals-Monet, girl-tries-to-get-boy, boy-sleeps-with-girl, incredible-jealousy-and-mindgames-ensue, and everything turns out happily ever after at the end.
As you can see, when The Thomas Crown Affair is broken down to its bare essentials, it does not offer much. What it offers instead is the meager compensation of Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan going at it like rabbits.
In short, a perfect example of Hollywood exploitation.
Soapbox aside, the movie is so utterly weak that it cannot maintain anyone's interest for more than a few minutes. Because they are simply relying on sex appeal, which Rene Russo lost in my mind after her femme fatale performance in Get Shorty, the actors do not draw you into their characters. There is not one iota of emotion for them, not one bit that makes you care about how the movie ends.
Pierce Brosnan may very well use his Brit accent to make the girls slobber over him, and it may very well succeed, but my optimism, my idealism as a critic is that the audience has at least some intelligence left and will not just be duped by a nice ass.
Please don't disappoint me and see this film based solely on its very cheap, plastic surgery enhanced, assets.