Entrapment (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com/entrapment.html Member: Online Film Critics Society
*** out of four
Starring Sean Connery, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ving Rhames. Rated PG-13.
There are some pairs of actors and actresses that can light up the screen when they are together. Can you recall how well Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau mixed before they degraded to the likes of such travesties as The Odd Couple 2? Remember how luminous a screen pair Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett were in My Best Friend's Wedding? If movie stars have chemistry they can do wonders for a film, and there is no better example than the terrific action thriller Entrapment, in which the show belongs to the aging Sean Connery and the gorgeous Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Entrapment is a tricky little movie that stars Jones as Gin, an unusually agile insurance agent who has plans to track down and capture a notorious art thief named Robert MacDougal. She plans to accomplish this by presenting herself to him another thief and give him an opportunity to steal an ancient Chinese mask worth a reported $40 million dollars. Evidently he trusts her -- but not before stealing a few microchips worth millions and threaten to frame her if she betrays him.
Ving Rhames, one of my favorite actors, has a minor, although deceptive role in the movie, but it is not minor enough to dissappoint; it is so underwritten that Rhames is not given the opportunity to inject his trademark charisma into the script. The rest of the cast fares far better: as a matter of fact, Connery and Jones shine. Despite their fairly obvious age difference, the two seem to be made for each other and the script made just for them. It is always a virtue for an otherwise inconsistent film for its stars to invariably grab our attention.
Although Entrapment is always fun, sometimes outrageously exciting, sometimes wickedly tricky and sometimes intriguing in human aspects of the story, much of the plot and continuity will not stand to close scrutiny. To wit, essential plausibility is often sacrificed for the sake of showing us something cool. Sometimes it is but sometimes it just makes so little sense that it undermines the flow of the movie.
On the bright side, although the movie does feature its share of nifty high-tech gadgets, director Jon Amiel (Copycat, The Man Who Knew Too Little) for the most part avoids utilizing those gadgets to neatly rescue his characters when they back themselves into a corner. So many James Bond-type thrillers do that, and it's often times frustrating because it usually demonstrates a lack of creativity on the part of the filmmakers.
Of course movies about thieves, deceptions and lies of all sorts have to have some sort of surprise at the end, but Entrapment does this interestingly. The movie drops all sorts of clues to the movie's big secret -- even some that are blatantly obvious, but you don't realize how obvious they were until after the secret is revealed. It's refreshing to see a film that plays fair with it's audience; there is nothing that it throws at you that the perceptive viewer couldn't have suspected.
There's a difference between this and predictability. If the film were to be predictable, Amiel and his screenwriters would've had to have done their best to conceal their trick from you but blunder so that you were able to guess it. But here, they purposely and seemingly subtly give you a chance to figure out what's going on before coming right out and saying it at the end. When this method succeeds it's not predictability.
Entrapment is an engrossing, fun, effective thriller that triumphs despite its continuity errors. It works because of its stars, because of its smarts and because of its deftess in bringing a script to throbbing, pulsating life. ©1999 Eugene Novikov
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