I dearly hope this review is a million miles off target... I see the film this coming Wednesday, and I have to tell ya... I've been looking forward to it ever since I first heard that Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones (and VING RHAMES!!!) were attached. I'm just hoping The Spleen has digestive failure and didn't get it... But... Till later, let this be a subtle warning, lest our hopes be too high... (as if the MATRIX didn't infect us with that virius!)
“Entrapment?”
Try “Mission: Disposable.”
Jon Amiel, the director who helped derail Bill Murray’s career with “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” turns his attention to the heist genre, but “Entrapment” excites little more than a sense of sadness and borderline-horror -- especially in how it serves to defame not only beloved thespians Sean Connery and Ving Rhames, but screenwriter Ron Bass in the bargain.
Not that this should surprise truly tuned-in AICN readers. If Fox believed – as Warners did with “Matrix” – that it had a major action franchise on its hands, why launch it just 20 days before “The Phantom Menace?” (Legions starved for entertainment – marching alongside the always-quick-to-mobilize army of the easily bamboozled -- will nonetheless surely secure for this pricey nonsense a first weekend at the top of the box office charts. But watch that plummet on weekend two.)
Oh, don’t be misled by the presence of Bass’s name on the screenplay. The man who penned “Rain Man,” “Joy Luck Club” and “My Best Friend’s Wedding” seems these days to be spreading himself thinner than a certain Fox TV lawyer. In the last 12 months alone, we have seen Bass’ name adorn scripts for such less-than-luminous efforts as “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” “What Dreams May Come,” and “Stepmom,” but when his name flashes upon the screen at the end of “Entrapment,” one feels genuine betrayal. The dialog for which Bass takes partial credit (William Broyles Jr., one of the screenwriters who adapted Jim Lovell’s book “Lost Moon” into “Apollo 13,” is the other credited scribe) is clumsy, leaden and familiar enough to make one look more kindly upon the poor souls who crank out “Walker: Texas Ranger” each week.
The plot, about a pair of rival high-tech thieves who must overcome mutual mistrust to pull off a heist (an $8 billion heist that can only be perpetrated in the last ten seconds of 1999), is as confusing as the film’s characters are uninvolving. But not all fault with this movie can be attributed to its script.
One of more wrongheaded ideas was trying to pull Connery, who turns 69 this summer, into such a such a physically demanding role. It becomes painful to watch the man who once made the outlandish James Bond so convincing now trying to limp and hobble urgently after athletic, twentysomething Catherine Zeta-Jones. His physique remains so well-concealed thoughout the enterprise that audiences can’t help but be aware of the stunt and special-effects fakery as his character dangles from Malaysian high-rises.
This high-rise dangling, dimly evocative of similar Connery derring-do in “Diamonds are Forever,” underscores another major problem “Entrapment” faces: the new film constantly reminds one of older, better films. The tepid skyscraper shenanigans evoke not only “Diamonds,” but the better- crafted action caper “Die Hard.”
Rhames, so nuanced and compelling in projects like “Pulp Fiction” and “Out of Sight,” is reduced to the most generic of foul-mouthed minority badasses. Perversely, he seems to have been cast in his colorless role only to remind us of the superiority of another high-tech heist movie in which he played a prominent role, Brian DePalma’s “Mission: Impossible.”
Almost as ill-served is Zeta-Jones, lovely as ever but hobbled by an American accent that highlights her resemblance to the edgier and more expressive (if equally lovely) Linda Fiorentino.
But God love character actor Maury Chaykin, whose brief, demented appearance as a bellicose high-tech barterer not only feels like it fell out of different, better movie, but almost (almost) makes us happy to see a loud, half-naked fat man wearing lipstick. This horror of a human being manifests virtually the only scrap of texture in what is otherwise the blandest film of the year.
The Spleen
