1998’s Enemy of the State was, for the most part, the first film that the movie studios relied on Will Smith to carry. This was Smith’s seventh movie overall and the fourth where he was one of the big stars in the film. The other three were Bad Boys (where he had Martin Lawrence), Men In Black (where he had Tommy Lee Jones), and 1991’s summer blockbuster Independence Day. This was certainly not a make-or-break movie for Smith, but a domestic gross of $111 million and favorable reviews from the critics helped cement him in the Hollywood landscape, where he has remained ever since.
In this Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Man On Fire) action-packed thriller, Smith plays Robert Clayton Dean, a highly successful lawyer and loving family man who is a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He unknowingly becomes involved in a government cover-up when he is slipped a disc with video footage that shows the murder of a senator who is opposed to a bill that would allow for more government snooping by the hands of upper-echelon members of the National Security Agency.
From here, it becomes a game of cat and mouse as Dean tries to outrun and outsmart Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight – Deliverance, The Champ) and his henchmen. In addition to hunting him down with listening devices, bugs, wiretaps, spy satellites, and seemingly every other piece of surveillance technology known to man, a vindictive Reynolds also cancels Dean’s credit cards, gets him fired, leaks false information about an alleged affair, and even tries to frame him for the murder that he directed. Dean unexpectedly hooks up with Edward ‘Brill’ Lyle (Gene Hackman – Hoosiers, The French Connection), a paranoid hired gun who leads a covert life, trying to protect the privacy rights of individuals and limit what the government can monitor. Brill briefs Dean and becomes a confidant and, perhaps, the only person Dean can trust.
While over the top at times, Enemy of the State is a compelling thriller. This movie is never going to win any awards for its acting, but that’s different from what it’s designed to do. At the same time, there was more effort to go into the character’s mode of thinking than an ordinary action movie does. This movie also effectively separated Will Smith, the dramatic actor, from Will Smith, the title character on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air television show that was a comedic hit for seven seasons in the early 1990s. Just three years after Enemy of the State, Smith earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor as Muhammad Ali in Ali.
This movie does for domestic surveillance what Sandra Bullock’s 1995 The Net did for computer espionage and identity theft. These turn-of-the-century movies show what could happen to us if we anger the wrong group of people. While scary to think about back in the late 1990s, we now know that these ultra-changing technologies aren’t as far-fetched as they once seemed.
Plot 8.5/10
Character Development 5/10
Character Chemistry 6.5/10
Acting 7.5/10
Screenplay 6.5/10
Directing 8/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 9.5/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
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