DIRECTOR
Jon Amiel
SCREENWRITERS
Ron
Bass
William Broyles Jr.
STORY
BY
Ron
Bass
Michael Hertzberg
PRODUCERS
Sean Connery
Michael Hertzberg
Rhonda Tollefson
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Phil Meheux
MUSIC
Christopher Young
EDITOR
Terry Rawlings
CAST
Sean Connery (Robert MacDougall)
Catherine Zeta-Jones (Virginia Baker)
Ving Rhames (Aaron Thibadeaux)
Will Patton (Hector Cruz)
Maury Chaykin (Conrad Greene)
Kevin McNally (Haas)
Terry O'Neill (Quinn)
MPAA rating: PG-13
Running
time: 113m
U.S. release: April 30, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Jon
Amiel movies
reviewed on this website:
- Copycat
- The
Man Who Knew Too Little
|
I
always love when they break out the cool gadgets in movies like
Entrapment. Here is a computer-controlled cord precisely
calibrated to drop a person down the side of a building and gently
slow him down to exactly where he needs to be. Here also is a
hand-held device for decoding a security system, and a long,
thin pair of cutters with a penlight attached -- perfect for
those occasions when you need to snip an alarm wire in back of
a painting. Do these gizmos actually exist in real life? I have
no idea, but damn it, they look cool.
So do Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Entrapment
is clearly meant to be an old-school, stylish caper movie in
which we watch cool people doing cool things (hey, it worked
for The
Matrix). Such a movie hardly needs a plot; all we really
want is to watch the anti-heroes prepare for the caper, do the
caper, and get away with it. But the people behind Entrapment
-- director Jon Amiel, writers Ron Bass and William Broyles --
seem to think we need a lot of twists and turns and double-crosses.
That's not necessary. Sometimes cool people with cool gadgets
are enough for a spring-afternoon piece of Hollywood entertainment.
Connery is Robert "Mac" MacDougall, a legendary thief
who apparently has the ability to materialize and dematerialize
at will (if so, you wonder why he needs all the gadgets to break
into buildings). One night he materializes in the hotel room
of Virginia Baker (Zeta-Jones), an investigator who's been itching
to catch him. Virginia is also, as it happens, not too shabby
in the thievery department herself; she proposes that they team
up to steal a priceless Chinese mask, and then take advantage
of the impending Y2K shutdown on "Millennium Midnight"
(the movie is erroneously said to take place "days before
the millennium," though smart people know the millennium
doesn't actually begin until January 1, 2001).
Part of the fun of Entrapment is watching old pro Connery
and relative newcomer Zeta-Jones interact -- the twilight of
a seasoned star meets the dawn of a fresh one. Connery has the
weight of authority and experience, and he's amusing here when
he grows impatient with his protegé (or backs away from
her romantic advances), or when he's posing as a harmless tourist
snapping pics of the Kuala Lampur bank the thieves have targeted
for their $8 billion caper. Zeta-Jones has beauty and brains,
plus a spark of wit, but she needs better scripts. In this movie
and The
Mask of Zorro she's proven she can be a movie star, but
time will tell whether she can be an actress to contend with,
given richer material.
Besides the gadgetry, the best part of Entrapment is the
middle section, when Mac trains Virginia. She has to writhe and
curl across a room, avoiding red strands of yarn standing in
for the laserbeams guarding the mask; she goes through other
preparations we don't fully understand until the actual caper.
To me, the bulk of the movie should have been the training, and
the climax should have been the theft of the mask (though there
are some deft moments of tension in the later bank caper). The
movie runs on a bit longer than it should, with double-crosses
inside double-crosses; it's a little too plot-heavy. Jon Amiel
should have trusted the charisma of his two leads. Entrapment
gets by well enough on style and star chemistry and the basic
allure of watching a tightly-planned caper unfold. Simply a half
hour of set-up, a half hour of training, and a half hour of the
caper itself would have sufficed. Some might also throw in a
half hour of Catherine Zeta-Jones writhing under the yarn, but
let's not go there. |