I don’t think I’d be too out of line by suggesting that during the 90s, Tony had supposed Ridley about who was the best Scott brother. While Ridley had started the decade strong with Thelma And Lousie, his subsequent output included a string of flops that contained the underappreciated likes of 1492: Conquest Of Paradise, White Squall and G.I. Jane before he regained his footing with Gladiator. Tony on the other hand, started off a little shaky with Revenge and Days Of Thunder, and then shifted into overdrive with The Last Boy Scout, True Romance and Crimson Tide.
However, after stumbling with glossy psycho-thriller, The Fan, Scott needed to finish the decade strong; and in 1998, who was stronger than Will frickin’ Smith? Thus these two veterans of Jerry Bruckheimer productions came together to give us a paranoia-soaked techno-thriller that – let’s be honest – is still as pertinent today as it was then.
Diligent labour lawyer Robert Clayton Dean has many different stressful situations in his live at the moment, with trying to buy Christmas presents coming a distant second to the fact that his recent work has angered a local mob boss who isn’t going light on the threats – but soon, all these issues will feel like a blissfully memory when Robert somehow finds himself in the middle of a murderous conspiracy.
You see, driven Senior NSA Assistant Director Thomas Reynolds has been desperately been nagging Congressman Phil Hammersley to greatly expand the surveillance in America to George Orwell 1984 standards in order to aid counterterrorism, but when he doesn’t get the answer he wants, he gets one of his goons to off him and make it look like a heart attack. However, irony is a bitch sometimes, as it seems that a random hidden camera installed to track geese migration picked up the whole damn thing, and now a random biologist has prove of one of the greatest political crimes in history.
Reynolds calls in the troops under the official blanket of a training op, but during the frantic chase to obtain the damning footage, it’s transferred to a blissfully unaware Robert, who has no clue his life is about to be surgically taken apart by his own government. Family, job, credit cards; nothing is sacred once the Reynolds’ grip begins to tighten, but salvation may lie with an unpredictable (and very grumpy) source.
Enter the mysterious “Brill”, the shadowy person who usually conducts surveillance jobs for Robert’s cases through a mutual friend – could he be the one to untangle all of this spy shit and give our hero his life back? Well, he might, if he wasn’t so fucking miserable.
Simply put, Enemy Of The State is the type of paranoia thriller that was insanely prevalent in the 70s, but with that thick layer of 90s gloss that came with literally every film that either Tony Scott of Jerry Bruckheimer came within 600 feet of. While you could argue that removing the grit and gravity of such films as The Conversation, Three Days Of The Condor and Marathon Man kind of defeats the purpose, a new decade with all the new toys that comes with it means a new approach. This means that Scott is probably one of the most perfect guys in Hollywood guys to visualise whizzing satellites, crackling CCTV images and frantic tapping on keyboards as he aims all of the above directly at Will Smith’s planetoid-sized charm. With that, we get the kind of rapid-fire editing that would give Michael Bays a fucking aneurysm as we zip between Smith, various POV shots of the countless cameras aimed at him from all directions and dry asides from the vast amounts of people chasing him and it is – of course – thrilling as hell.
However, grounding the lightning strikes of Scott’s strobe-like editing, is Will Smith who nicely drops a large portion of his “Big Willy” persona in order to play more of a mature victim than the quib-spitting hero in movies like Independence Day and Men In Black. Oh, he manages to get the occasional one liner out here and there, but he manages to resist trying to spark up the exact same kind of smart-ass relationship he did with Tommy Lee Jones back when they were arresting aliens together.
For a start, Gene Hackman’s Dill (aka. ex-Boss communications expert Edward Lyle) is far more a barking curmudgeon than Agent K could ever hope to be, be his presence here give Enemy Of The State a whole other level of credibility when you realise that Lyle isn’t a million miles removed from Harry Caul from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and there’s that weird feeling that this film could be passed off as head cannon follow up much in the same way some has proposed that Sean Connery’s character in The Rock was actually an aged James Bond. I mean, if I had a pound for every 90s Jerry Bruckheimer production that could act as a non-official legacy sequel, I’d have two – but it’s still weird that it happened twice.
Elsewhere Scott pulls a neat trick with the expansive cast as he gathers up a bundle of young, up-and-comers and scatters them into the different groups that work for the NSA. For example, he enlists a gang from the nerds du jour of the decade in the form of professional oddballs such as Seth Green, Jack Black and Jamie Kennedy to tap away behind computer screens while he fills the roles of the cocky field agents with the likes of Barry Pepper, Jake Busey and a Bart Simpson-haired Scott Caan. On top of that, he also has stalwarts such as Jon Voight and Tom Sizemore to fill in those other parts that require a sinister government type and a temperamental monster respectively.
It’s not flawless. The breathless pace the film sets is a little at odds with the rather hefty runtime, which means that the movie kind of runs out of steam around twenty minutes before the end and the Mexican standoff climax – which is essentially lifted wholesale from Scott’s own True Romance – is a bit too neat and blockbuster-y way to end such a complex movie. However, while Enemy Of The State is rarely mention in the same breath as those other, Bruckheimer-backed action/thrillers of the decade, it’s a movie that disturbingly has only become more and more relevant in a post 9/11 world and now actually plays far better today, despite some amusingly dated tech and an incredibly Michael Bay-esque lingerie shop where the staff literally wander around in bra and panties – in December.
Proving that the paranoia thriller is still alive and well (Scott also went on to make the far more mature Spy Games) Enemy Of The State may not have the the agonising tension of some of its more down-to-earth, 70s forebears, but it still manages to make terrifying government conspiracies look damn cool.
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