On paper, John McTiernan’s remake of the slick, 1968 crime caper, The Thomas Crown Affair should have provided anything new – I mean, just look at its parameters. It’s a remake for a start, do that party’s fairly obvious, but it’s not like the director hadn’t staged a complicated heist set in New York before (hello, Die Hard With A Vengence) and also Pierce Brosnan certainly wasn’t a stranger to playing swaggering, sharpsuited playboys who has women practically falling at his feet before, as he frequently played variations on his James Bond persona between stints of waving around the old Walter PPK.
However, there was something decidedly refreshing about the 1999 version that not only treated its audience as adults, but added to this by letting its characters act like adults – especially when it came to the more… ah, intimate matters of a relationship.
Billionaire Thomas Crown may hand the upper hand in the boardroom when it comes to mergers and acquisitions, but despite having a truly disgusting amount of wealth and no one around to tell him how to use it, he’s grown bored – spending his downtime staring whimsically at a particular painting in the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. However, one day a group of thieves manage to infiltrate it via an incredibly complex plan involving actual Trojan horses, disguises and tapped phone lines lines, but despite the audacious nature of their heist, they are all captured and the robbery is thwarted.
Or is it? You see, during all the kerfuffle, its revealed that the heist is nothing more than an elaborate ruse and the thieves are only a distraction to let the actual mastermind, Crown himself, to slip in, swipe Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore At Dusk and slip out without anyone being the wiser, thus answering the question: what do you give the man who has everything? Nothing, let him steal it himself.
In response, as the NYPD try to try and figure out what the hell happened, bullish, brash insurance investigator Catherine Banning sweeps in with her provocative style and fuck you attitude on behalf of the people who will most definately feel that loss of a hundred million dollars of art. Aggressive as a pitbull and dogged as a bloodhound, Banning quickly zeroes in on Crown as the actual perpetrator, but this is only the beginning. Guessing that Crown is guilty is one thing, proving it is another, but the most pertinent issue seems to be the epic battle of wills between the Banning and her prey as their sizable levels of charisma see that they’re inextricably drawn to one another as each switches back and forth between being the cat or the mouse. But what will win out? The forces of law and order, or the fact that these two are impossibly hot for one another?
The Thomas Crown Affair has countless people toiling tirelessly both in front of, and behind the camera who all are striving to make the best, reverse heist movie in existence and the main reason I’m mentioning it now is because pretty much all I’ll be talking about here is the trio of John McTiernan, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo who each dominate proceedings to an insane degree.
I guess the best place to start is with the director himself, John McTiernan, who Knuckles down to deliver possibly his most confident and assured movie to date. While this sounds like an absurd claim when you take into account that this is the man who gave us Predator and Die Hard, but while these peerless examples of 80s excess are superior movies in their own respect, the sight of an alien walloping merry hell out Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis leaping off and exploding skyscraper manages to paper over many cracks. In comparison, The Thomas Crown Affair has no extraterrestrials or superior firepower to fall back on and has to rely on both subtlety and the substantial charisma of it’s two leads. McTiernan wields both expertly, letting the potent sexual fusion of Bronson and Russo do most of the heavy lifting for him why only really making himself visible for the two, incredibly satisfying heists that book-end the film. While both essentially feature Crown pulling some elaborate bait and switch while manufactured confusion reigns all about him, the director cuts through it all to provide rug pulls and reveals that are so cool you’ll want to punch the air. Having Nina Simone’s Sinnerman playing during both helps inordinately, but aside from this, the helmer is wise enough to step back for large periods of the running time in order to let the beautiful rich people play for our enjoyment.
This, obviously, brings us to our two leads and at first, there’s a sense that separately, the pair are going to deliver odd stereotypes. Pierce Brosnan has pretended to portray more charming playboys than a Monaco-based con-man and this particular proto-Bond doesn’t even have the sleazy hook of something like The Tailor Of Panama that would let the actor subvert that image. Conversely, Russo initially plays the tough female angle so broadly that when she first strides in and lays down the law to Dennis Leary’s bemused detective while clad like she’s just come from the Met Gala, it almost feels uncomfortably like parody.
And yet, once the game begins, the characters start to make perfect sense and synch up as perfectly. As do the actors, who display chemistry so powerful, their horny jousting could be used to strip paint, and it’s here that we find possibly the movies most admirable trait – its unwavering portrayal of fortysomethings flirting, dating and fucking with admirable gusto. Let’s not forget that Brosnan was 46 when making the film, while Russo was 45, and while that doesn’t sound that impressive, the movie defys Hollywood’s usual age-centric proclivities to not only give the two vigorous love scenes, but they give us quite an eyeful of how good their personal trainers were with a surprising amount of nudity.
While the extended glimpse of some impressively pert boobies and bottoms are hardly a guarantee of a great movie, it is refreshing to see a big, glossy, studio movie that’s driven by good, old fashioned, star power that wasn’t afraid to treat adults as adults and happily portray the sort of things that wealthy, impossibly photogenic people do – even if the movie goes off mission a bit two thirds of the way through and just has the leads do rich beautiful people stuff while the plot takes a break.
Understanding the brief that to make a film about characters such as these in a scenario such as this, it’s absolutely vital that you’re as confident as one and as ballsy as the other, McTiernan delivers his last great film before he started churning out the likes of the painfully insipid Rollerball remake. Sexy people, sexy lifestyles and the fact that cheeky art theft proves to be sexier than out and out bank robberies, all come together to make The Thomas Crown Affair an affair to remember.
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