January 14, 2002
Movie Review: Enemy of the State
Enemy of the State is the story of Will Smith playing a lawyer who unwittingly gets involved with evidence that a secret group of surveillance rogues within the NSA needs to get back. I know, this sounds like the plot of any number of cheesy movies, including ones starring Richard Grieco. And, well, this one was cheesy. It did have some good actors in it, and Will Smith can be fun to watch, but this movie really didn't make a lot of sense. Some of the technology the surveillance people had was stupidly implausible. And sometimes they didn't use the technology as effectively as they could have. It also relied on Will Smith's character to make an implausibly stupid mistake to keep the plot going. I've said this several times before and will probably need to say it again: if you are spending this much money to make a movie, can't you pay someone to make sure the movie makes sense? Doesn't anyone care about this? So, I guess you could do worse for an action movie, but don't expect anything unusual. Well, heavy-handed speeches about electronic privacy aren't common in action movies, I guess. And they probably never will be after 9/11. Until the ACLU starts funding movies... hmmm...
Posted by babar at January 14, 2002 10:49 PM