Andrew Worsdale Pick of the week
`This is the richest and most powerful nation of all and so it is the most hated … this country is at war 24-hours a day.” So says Jon Voight in his role as chief of the United States’s national security agency in Tony Scott’s exhilarating paranoid thriller, Enemy of the State.
Paranoia is major fuel for film plots. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest has Cary Grant as an ad- man who takes on a new identity while trying to find out who framed him for murder. It is a gem of a paranoid thriller, infusing conspiracy, Freudian nightmares and a coruscating parable of modern America.
There was Sydney Pollack’s 1975 thriller Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford as a reader at the American Literary Historical Society who returns from lunch to find all in the office have been murdered. It is a masterful conspiracy thriller with one innocent man battling CIA machinations.
The Parallax View, Alan J Pakula’s 1974 thriller, had Warren Beatty as a journalist investigating the mysterious deaths of witnesses to the assassination of a presidential candidate. His investigation reveals a conspiracy of all-embracing scope.
And then, of course, there’s The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s dazzling thriller with Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a master of electronic surveillance. He uncovers a political conspiracy which leads to his undoing.
All of these movies are well worth renting from the video store, but if it’s big screen action you’re after, Enemy of the State is the film to see. In fact, it could well be labelled The Conversation II – it even has a portrait of Hackman as Caul. The moustache, horn-rimmed glasses and look of suspicion are a perfect tip-off by director Scott that the audience must relate the films.
Will Smith plays a successful lawyer who is caught in a web of murder and conspiracy.
He bumps into an acquaintance who secretly slips him a computer disk containing a video file of a congressman (played by an uncredited Jason Robards) being killed by government agents.
The innocent lawyer is then hunted down. His only hope is an informer known as Brill (played by Hackman), a mysterious figure who works in an abandoned warehouse surrounded with copper mesh so as to prevent government agents from listening in.
What the film posits is frighteningly possible. For example, when you use your credit card or make a telephone call, you leave a digital footprint that enables you to be tracked.
But Scott is more interested in the visceral energy of a thriller – the film is incredibly well-polished, from the amazing credit sequence to the breathtaking action scenes.
It’s the perfect David versus Goliath film. Screenwriter David Marconi perfectly manufactures the lead character as Everyman and Smith’s easy-going personality is well suited to the part. Hackman’s performance is arresting.
With its high-contrast lighting, rush tracking shots, aerial photography, jump cuts and acute angles, this is a well- executed actioner. It runs for more than two-and-a-half hours, but you will be enthralled every minute of the way.
Scott has had his flops, like the treachery thriller Revenge, but his hits include Top Gun and True Romance. No doubt, his latest film will be another audience-pleaser.
Enemy of the State leaves you with something to think about. After seeing this intelligent thriller you might think twice about using your credit card, making a phone call or logging on to the Internet – after all, who knows who may be watching you?