In the summers that aren't Bond-summers, we get the Bond-movies without Bond. Which is to say gadget movies, all the high-tech toys and death-defying leaps that'll fit into 2 hrs. Entrapment is all of this and more: it even has the original Bond--Sean Connery--playing high-stakes cat thief Mac. More or less the same veteran criminal-type role he had for The Rock, except this time he's starring opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones, insurance agent (Gin Baker), high-altitude acrobat, sharp dresser. The Bond-girl has to be all of this and more. Gin Baker is, and then some. But too, she has a day job, or, more specifically, an assignment: to gain Mac's confidence via assuming the role of fellow-thief, then turn him in. In a nutshell, this is Entrapment (and Donnie Brasco, and countless more). Granted, the technical difficulty-level of the robberies Mac and Gin attempt together does escalate, which is satisfying, and their relationship does flirt with intimacy, which is necessary, but, as the title suggests, that's not really what it's all going to be about. What it is all about is entrapment, defined in the trailer as what the law does to the unlawful. And whether honor among thieves applies or not. And who's entrapping whom in the first place. Ving Rhames is even in there somewhere, waltzing through his Mission Impossible role again. To director Jon Amiel's credit, though, he does keep us guessing until the final frames (via occlusion, which isn't quite fair, but so it goes), when everyone takes their double-agent masks off and bears their collective souls. Which is to say he never quite lets Entrapment get lost in its own gadgetry. Instead, he does another version of the same sleight-of-hand Raiders of the Lost Ark pulled off once and for all: he not only legitimizes the thief, he glorifies the thief. The thing is, if we don't have sympathy for the main character, if we don't want Indiana Jones to get away with the golden idol (and thus 'preserve' it), then the rest of the movie tends to fall apart. And there's many ways of legitimizing the theif. Absolute Power does it by essentially cleansing the (similarly) aging criminal's crime, making it petty in comparison to the crime he witnesses. Which creates a hierarchy of criminal acts, which succeeds in making the thief less a thief. Entrapment goes about it differently. What Mac steals is largely modern art, which the 'modern' world doesn't assign that much value in the first place. So, suddenly, petty larceny's the name of the game; nobody's starving as a result of Mac's crime habit. Add to this the fact that he's not stealing it to resell, but to ornament his Highlander- esque castle, and he's either a lonely gentleman addicted to the thrill of the game or a particularly debonair bachelor in need of interior decoration, either of which are forgivable. Where Entrapment breaks away from tradition--at least the Bond-type tradition--is that the narrative finally isn't hinged upon one final stunt that outdoes all previous stunts, but upon a man and a woman alone in a train station. This isn't The Jackal or The Saint, with little epilogues tacked on as an afterthought. Here, the epilogue is the final stunt. While that may not quite satisfy those who actually expect such developments in a movie, it does set Entrapment slightly above the usual Bond-replacement, which, in a Bond-less summer, might just be enough. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones for more like this, check out http://www.cinemuck.com
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