Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith, Gene Hackman and Jon Voight 2 1/2 stars out of 4
Depending on your level of paranoia, you will either scoff at Enemy of the State or check your toothbrush, smoke alarm, cell phone and various items of clothing to see if Big Brother is indeed monitoring every moment of your life.
Enemy of the State builds upon the concept that ours, because of video camera, spy satellites and other technological marvels, is a world in which privacy is a quickly becoming an illusion.
As chief villain Jon Voight explains, soon the only privacy will be what's in your head.
As the film opens, a congressional committee is looking at a bill that will allow the government to conduct unfettered surveillance of its citizens. After all, supposedly lots of people out there - in and out of the country - hate the United States and its way of life and want to destroy it. Thus the justification for the bill's passage.
To get what he wants, Voight, a top government official, resorts to murder. Unbeknownst, at least at the outset, to Voight and his team of techno-nerds, is that the crime was caught on tape.
This discovery sets off a chain of events that eventually involves Robert Dean (Will Smith), a labor lawyer whose life is turned upside down - and for most of the proceedings he doesn't even know why.
It seems he was slipped a copy of the incriminating footage copied onto a computer disk, and Voight's operatives are trying to retrieve it wouth tipping their hands.
What makes Enemy of the State work, and it does up until the last reel, is the little voice it sets off in the back of your mind. Sure, it's fiction, a movie.
But, does the government have the capabilities to watch our every move, and if it does, are we being spied upon right now.
The movie plays off the now common usage of video cameras everywhere - in restaurants, department store changing rooms, sky cams, cameras that monitor busy intersections.
Do they all feed into a mainframe somewhere that the government can log onto the check up on us? Possible, but highly, improbable. Or is it?
Eventually Dean teams up with a former operative (Gene Hackman) and all is made right with the world - or at least Dean's portio of it.
Director Tony Scott keeps the paranoia level high, continually showing scenes of a spy satellites being moved around merely to spy on one individual, while his operatives plant bugs and transmitters on Dean's clothes, shoes, phone and pen.
But eventually Scott and and his four screenwriters run out of imagination and resort to a ludicrious finale involving a stereotypical Mafia boss, who acts like a grade Z Don Corleone.
This nearly destroys all the nearly one hour and 45 minutes that lead up to this point.
Smith works very well as the confused, but determined lawyer who is in over his head, and completely unaware of the machinations going on around him.
As in Independence Day and Men in Black, Smith works best when paired with an older, more experienced actor. In ID4 it was Jeff Goldblum, Tommy Lee Jones created chemistry in Men in Black, and in Enemy of the State, Smith teams with Hackman, as a disheveled, semi-paranoid ex-operative who helps Dean regain his life and in the process, gets one for himself.
The real treat is watching the young supporting actors who play Voight's team of computer nerds who treat the entire affair as if it the planet was their own private video screen and we were all pawns they could move around in a game of life and death.
They're not evil, per se, just deadened. They have lost their humanity to their computers and are either unconcerned or unaware of the havoc they wreak.
Enemy of the State is a colorful political thriller. You may find it perposterous or you may think it hits too close to him - maybe too close. Either way, after seeing it, you'll be more conscious of the technology surrounding you.
Bob Bloom is the film critic at the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, Ind. He can be reached by e-mail at bloom@journal-courier.com
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