Enemy of the State . The Boston Phoenix . 11-30-98

Enemy of the State

DIRECTED BY: Tony Scott

REVIEWED: 11-30-98

Nobody seems more concerned with civil liberties these days than Hollywood. Joining the specter of martial law raised in The Siege is the threat of government invasion of privacy in Enemy of the State, a glitzy, thoughtful, overlong paranoid thriller by Tony Scott that suffers from derivativeness and a surplus of satellite imagery, car crashes, and hammered keyboards.

Will Smith is plucky and vulnerable as Robert Dean, a smooth corporate lawyer drawn unwittingly into becoming a bastion of the Fourth Amendment. The inadvertent recipient of a tape of a political assassination plotted by rogue National Security Agency administrator Reynolds (Jon Voight, oddly resembling Ken Starr), he's stunned as his plush life collapses. He's implicated in scandal, his wife dumps him, he loses his job, his credit cards are rejected, people try to kill him. More insidious and powerful than the CIA, the NSA has access to mind-boggling espionage technology -- bugs, computers, satellites, nerdy hackers -- that make every citizen's life a Truman Show.

Only Brill (a crotchety Gene Hackman) -- a shadowy surveillance expert -- can help Dean fight back. Enemy's debt to Coppola's brilliant The Conversation is acknowledged not just by the casting of Hackman but by a painstaking, if gratuitous, re-creation of that film's opening scene. Wim Wenders is less lucky, though Gabriel Byrne from his The End of Violence -- which Enemy copies in style and subject -- has a bit part. And Scott filches from himself with the True Romance-like ending. Although clever and provocative, Enemy is hardly state of the art.

--Peter Keough

Full Length Reviews
Enemy of the State

Capsule Reviews
Enemy of the State
Enemy of the State
Enemy of the State

Other Films by Tony Scott
Crimson Tide
The Hunger

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Invasion USA
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