BEFORE: Catherine Zeta-Jones pulls off a three-peat of her own, carrying over from "The Legend of Zorro". This sets up some Sean Connery films, and this is pretty much the way January's going to go, with each actor settling in for three or four films, then handing off to another in a cascading chain. (Yeah, I had a lot of time in November to set this up...) How long can I keep this up? Probably only the next 100 films or so. OK, 200, tops.
THE PLOT: An insurance agent is sent by her employer to track down and help capture an art thief.
AFTER: Back in the early days of cinema, characters tended to be just one thing. Take Sam Spade, he was a detective, and that's all. That's all he ever was, that's all he'll ever be, because that was all the films needed him to be. Jimmy Stewart's character in "Rear Window" was a photographer, that's all we needed to know about him, and that was all the background needed for him when he started spying on his neighbors.
Things got a little more interesting in the 1970's and 80's, when action films discovered that characters could start out as one thing, then end up as something else. "Jaws" gave us a sheriff who became a shark hunter, "Star Wars" presented a farmboy who became a Jedi Knight, and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" showed that an archaeologist could also become a superhero of sorts.
Television sort of picked up on that trend, and I don't just mean sitcoms where a doctor is also a family man, I mean shows like "Murder, She Wrote", where a mystery writer also manages to solve crimes in the real world. What you see now in a lot of TV shows are characters who are two contrasting things - like a criminologist who's also a serial killer ("Dexter") or a soldier who's also a terrorist ("Homeland").
I don't watch those shows, but I read a lot about them. This eventually leads to shows about women who make cupcakes but are somehow very skinny, or physicists who are socially inept yet somehow are able to be friends with each other and date pretty girls.
Stuck neatly between Phases 2 and 3 is a film like "Entrapment" - where the lead female is a security consultant for an insurance company, and is also training to be an art thief herself. Now, is she pretending to be an art thief in order to track down and entrap another thief, or is she pretending to be work for the insurance company in order to gain information to be a better thief? No spoilers here, you'll have to watch the film to find out. However, setting up a character as two opposing things should not be presented in place of character development - contrast does not equal change.
The insurance expert/budding thief gains the trust of the more experienced, older thief by helping him steal one object, then convinces him there's a bigger score to be had on the eve of the Millennium - Dec. 31, 1999. Technically, the new millennium didn't begin until one year later - Jan. 1, 2001 - but remember there was that big fear that the world's computers would all crash on Jan. 1, 2000 because nobody thought to program computers to flip to a new thousands digit, since we only had 999 years to prepare for that. (OK, since computers were invented, we only had about 50 years.)
It seems so quaint now, right? The theory that if the computers glitched, we'd all somehow be living out of cardboard boxes within weeks of Y2K, roasting rats over a trash can fire, after our bottled water and canned spam ran out. And to this film's credit, it didn't rely on the Y2K glitch to power its storyline, just the FEAR of the Y2K glitch, assuming that a major global banking corporation would shut down its systems for testing right after midnight on December 31. But then, the only thing the thieves could think to do was the same "steal a lot of half-pennies" idea seen in "Superman III" and "Office Space". What a shame.
NITPICK POINT: Since everyone somehow seems to think that the world revolves around New York City, they tend to forget that when the ball drops in Times Square, it's already been January 1 in Asia and Europe for some time. While the heist here is set in Malaysia, which may be in one of the first time zones to experience the new year, it just wouldn't be celebrated at the same time around the globe. This is why the U.S. was able to breathe easy during Y2K, because the clock and calendars changed over in Australia and Asia with no reported problems. (Except for the remote parts of Asia where it was still, like, 1800 or so.)
There's other silly stuff here too, of course, but a lot of it is standard fare for heist films. Like there's the natural assumption that any set of laser-beams (you know, those "electric eye" thingies) which are designed to cover a particular room completely can be outwitted if someone could just twist or gyrate or tumble their body through the room in a specific fashion. I think that this was just an excuse to put Ms. Zeta-Jones in a tight catsuit and make her bend over and stretch her body around the room - not that I'm complaining, mind you. And the other methods for countering pressure switches, retinal scans and keypad codes were even more ludicrous.
But hey, if you like seeing a 70-year old man romancing a 30-year old woman, maybe this is the film for you.
Also starring Sean Connery (last seen in "Marnie"), Ving Rhames (last seen in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry"), Will Patton (last seen in "A Mighty Heart"), Maury Chaykin (last seen in "A Life Less Ordinary").
RATING: 5 out of 10 mailing tubes
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