Enemy of the State by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
Stephen Covey is not a moviemaker, and unfortunately, compulsive moviegoing is not one of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But the best-selling author has something to teach us about the moviemaking process, and Enemy of the State serves as a vehicle for an Important Life Lesson in spite of itself.
Covey uses the metaphor of the personal savings account to describe individual integrity. Your "Personal Integrity Account" increases when you keep your promises to yourself and build your character. If you have high reserves in this account, you're better able to handle personal adversity. You can also make withdrawals from this account by doing things that undermine your personal integrity. (Example: "Enemy of the State is a non-stop roller-coaster of a movie! Be sure to catch this thrill ride!" Curtis Edmonds, freelance movie reviewer.)
Just as all of us have our own integrity accounts, actors have their own accounts that they've built up over the years. When they turn in good performances, they build up reservoirs of goodwill in the hearts and minds of the audience. These reservoirs can be depleted by a bad performance or filled to overflowing by great work. And if the actor's balance is very high, he can cash in some of that balance and turn in a performance where he doesn't have to do much heavy lifting. That's exactly what happens in Enemy of the State. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer has assembled a team of good actors -- Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Barry Pepper -- and inserted them into a man-on-the-run plotline where everything happens at high speed and character development is sacrificed for special effects.
The plot appears to be more complicated in the movie than it is on the trailers, but it really isn't. Prominent labor lawyer Will Smith has something that the government wants, and they chase him the whole entire movie in order to get it. The "something" in this case is a videotape of the murder of a Congressman by the National Security Agency. We know this, because the opening scene of the movie tells us the who and the why of the murder, instead of leaving us in the dark and letting us figure out what's happening at the same time Smith does. To its credit, Enemy of the State has a decent subplot involving the Mafia that distracts Smith -- but instead of letting the audience play along, we're cursed with our superior knowledge the whole way.
The novelty of the movie is supposed to be the use of satellite reconnisance to monitor Smith's every move. The satellite photography is outstanding, however they got it, but it's edited very jerkily and I think it's giving me a headache. The movie ends up being one chase scene after another, and all the chases seem cribbed from other, better movies. There's a dash of The Fugitive in a tunnel scene, a shot of John Grisham's whole lawyer-in-danger thing, a dab of Patriot Games in the satellite imagery, and generous splashes here and there of Quentin Tarantino, but the whole concoction never comes together. (In fact, there's enough Tarantino influence in Enemy of the State to make one wonder what QT might have done with the script and these actors -- not to mention that he might have been a good choice to play one of the geeky high-tech spies.)
To make matters worse, the actors in Enemy of the State aren't playing actual characters. Instead, they're playing their on-screen personas. Smith's character is the Smooth Action Hero, leavened with one-liners. The Smooth Action Hero is more mature than in Men In Black or Independence Day: the wisecracks are still there, but they're toned down somewhat. Hackman plays a renegade government agent who is trapped into helping Smith do the spy stuff, and he plays his part in the same Grumpy Old Commander persona that he displayed in Crimson Tide, his last effort with Scott. Voight is coming off evil performances in Mission: Impossible and The Rainmaker that mirror his performance as an oily National Security Agency executive. And Pepper, fresh from his bravura performance as a Southern sharpshooter in Saving Private Ryan, plays an NSA assassin who happens to have a Southern accent. All the above performances were pretty good -- save maybe for Voight's -- and they're what sustains Enemy of the State and what allows the actors to make big, huge withdrawals from their integrity accounts. Tom Sizemore, almost unrecognizable as a Mafia tough guy, looks to be the only actor who's not phoning in his performance.
Enemy of the State is not a bad movie, necessarily, it's just formulaic and derivative and dumb. It's not filmmaking so much as it's film processing, just throwing in bits from other movies into the cinematic Cuisinart and hoping everything comes out OK. What you get is a moderately entertaining movie with some good actors turning in average performances. Instead of being a win-win movie, (to return to the Covey bit for a second) it's a win-lose movie -- a win at the box office, a loss for the audience.
Rating: B-
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-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
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"Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
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