Will Power Wins Again

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

With a thong in his heart, an otherwise respectable lawyer named Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) drops into a store to buy his wife some sexy lingerie for Christmas. There he bumps into--or rather is bumped into by--an old, if mysteriously agitated, acquaintance. Next thing he knows, he's an Enemy of the State--his house, his marriage, his job, all trashed by powerful, shadowy forces. There being no limit to their depravity, they even invalidate his credit cards.

There's a plausible explanation--well, all right, a plot line that made some kind of sense to producer Jerry Bruckheimer--for the troubles visited on this perfectly nice chap. What he doesn't know, but we do, is that his pal has dropped a computer disc into one of his shopping bags. On it is irrefutable photographic evidence that a Congressman has been murdered by agents of a faceless government security agency for opposing its plan to destroy privacy as we know it in the U.S.

You can doubtless imagine just how strenuous an effort--much of it shot in raked angles and presented in quick cuts by director Tony Scott--is required of Dean to get his life back and his tormentors chastened. You can probably imagine, as well, the gleam, sheen and extensiveness of the high-tech machinery that a well-endowed bureaucracy can deploy to torment a citizen on which its baleful eye has fallen. You may even be able to predict the chipper amorality of the techies manning the keyboards and terminals. What do they care about ends when the means to it are so much fun to play with?

All this--not to mention the film's paranoid take on big, secretive government--is familiar stuff. Nor are the principal characters unknown quantities. Under pressure, Smith's attorney demonstrates the kind of stamina and physical agility that people confined to desk jobs find within themselves only in the movies. His sole ally, Brill, a former government operative who has turned into a rogue counterintelligence specialist, is played by Gene Hackman as a funny, cranky imitation--right down to the horn-rimmed glasses--of the snoop he played so memorably in The Conversation almost 25 years ago. And, as their chief nemesis, Jon Voight does another variation on his late-life specialty: the midnight conspirator whose puffy face stands in such curiously menacing contrast to his steely soul.

There are really only two surprising things about the movie. The first is that it works rather nicely. Strong technique, intensely applied to a project by a director like Scott or by actors like the ones working for him here, offers us simple and not entirely common rewards. The bigger surprise is the ending supplied by screenwriter David Marconi. All one can say about it, without spoiling the fun, is that no justice meted out at the conclusion of any action movie in recent memory is more poetically just, more brashly astonishing or better worth the rigors of the trip to it.

--By Richard Schickel