- I've always thought of Tony Scott as the most respectable and talented of the Jerry Bruckheimer protegees, and Enemy of the State helps illustrate why. While it would never be confused with a great film, its outstanding cast and clever writing conspire to produce a supremely entertaining movie. The hero of the piece is a lawyer named Robert Dean (Will Smith), who finds himself the unwitting recipient of a tape that implicates an N.S.A. boss named Reynolds (Jon Voight) in the death of a U.S. Senator. But this is the age of surveillance run amok, so it only takes a few absurdly accurate digital reconstructions before Reynolds' thugs are knocking on the Dean family door. Apparently undiscouraged by the lack of a search warrant, they return to ransack the home, but this is only a prelude to coordinated attacks on Dean's credit cards, bank accounts, personal life, and reputation. Soon Dean finds himself running scared, and the only person he can turn to is an anonymous source named "Brill."
- With multiple action sequences and an abundance of interesting characters to follow, it's easy to forget that Brill doesn't actually appear until an hour into the film. In one of the film's smartest sequences, a man who identifies himself as Brill (Gabriel Bryne) meets Dean in an appropriately clandestine manner, but...wait a minute, who's that following them in the truck? Why, that's the real Brill, also known as Edward Lyle (Gene Hackman), and he'd be surprised if Dean lives another 24 hours. Lyle was once a government spook himself, you see, and he knows that these situations never end well. In fact, Lyle could easily be an older version of an earlier Gene Hackman character, The Conversation's Harry Caul, except that he seems to have honed his skills a bit over the past thirty years. To give just one example, Lyle is the sort of paranoiac who keeps his unnetworked computers inside a gigantic Faraday cage rigged to an explosive device. But then again, perhaps it is wrong to call him paranoid. He and Dean really are being watched, and even a block-leveling explosion won't be enough to keep Reynolds from trying to chase them to their deaths.
- It should probably suffice to say that the film grows increasingly hyperbolic until it reaches a conclusion that involves an ITALIAN the likes of whom the anti-defamation league has never seen (Tom Sizemore) and one of the larger Mexican standoffs ever put on film. While this admittedly amusing finale wraps up several loose ends (by killing them), it also inadvertently illustrates one reason that Enemy of the State is not a great film. In The Conversation, we are left to wonder if or, more likely, when Harry Caul's paranoia will drive him completely mad. Here, Reynolds gets only a small dose of his own medicine before he and nearly every other badguy get completely obliterated. While one could argue that the film's dizzying cuts and short average shot length reinforce the surveillance themes, the film's abrupt coda feels like a cheap way to end an otherwise enjoyable feature. Maybe Scott shouldn't have gone quite so far in inviting comparisons to a much better film.
- Wow, lots of recognizable cast members. How about Jason Robards, Lisa Bonet, Regina King, Barry Pepper, Jake Busey, Scott Caan, Jason Lee, Jack Black, Philip Baker Hall, and Seth Green?
