Entrapment (1999)

After a famous and very expensive painting is stolen by a hi-tech criminal, an insurance employee is sent by her company to spy on him. Persuaded by her looks, the thief agrees to make a team with her in a new, even mightier theft, using state of the art technology.It's a movie designed to impress the viewers, with its fancy gimmicks and accessories while taking advantage of two good actors in an attempt to create a suspenseful atmosphere. It manages to do so in an important manner but it is simply let down by an average plot and bad dialog. They are very simple, linear and predictable, making the sequences between the robberies a real pain. You can imagine it as a soap opera, disguised as a film, fact which is simply unacceptable in this type of movie where the main characters are supposedly robbing very high value objects. The producers also tried to do something different with the finale but they simply failed to impress or at least provide a bit of satisfaction. Besides these problems, the whole technology part is way too exaggerated, making a lot of aspects of it seem improbable or impossible, thus spoiling a bit the excitement.Unfortunately, it's an average movie which had a good idea and two good actors but failed to implement it and link all the aspects into an uniform final product.

"Entrapment" is one of a new breed of crime-action-thrillers. It is one of high tech crimes, usually involving computers and electronics and gadgetry of all sorts. While there was an occasional film of the high tech of the time as far back as the 1950s, this sub-genre burst forth by the end of the 20th century. From the late 1980s to beyond the first decade of the 21st century, a plethora of high tech crime films was made. But after nearly 30 years, there's hardly any new idea for a plot. And, the genre began to get old and worn out within 20 years. I saw this film when it came out in theaters in 1999, but couldn't remember that much about it. With me, if a movie isn't memorable, it's not very good or one I would rate very highly. By the same token, if I don't remember a film as being bad, I may watch one I had seen before. That's the case with this movie. After watching it again now, I guess that I might have rated it one star higher than I do now. Because that was 1999, and the high tech crime caper plot hadn't yet quite worn out. And, this film packs a lot of crime caper action into it, with a good cast. Even then, at age 69 Sean Connery was too old to be playing these types of roles. My six stars are mostly for the suspense in the plot over the question of trust among thieves.The action makes this film mildly entertaining. But this film just reaffirms to me again, how the modern bent for fast movies with wild action require so little acting talent of the cast. Perhaps, one day when we run through the newer fads of films (now, much fantasy and other- worldly stuff), Hollywood will again make some quality comedies and real life dramas in which most of those in the acting profession can once again ply their trade.

"Entrapment" is the very embodiment of a star vehicle: a movie with a preposterous plot, exotic locations, absurd action sequences, and so much chemistry between attractive actors that we don't care. It stars Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in a caper that reminded me of "To Catch a Thief," "Charade," "Topkapi" and the stunt sequences in Bond pictures. I didn't believe a second of it, and I didn't care that I didn't.The film is about thieves. Connery plays a man named Mac, who is getting along in years but is still respected as the most resourceful master thief in the world. Jones plays Gin, who in the early scenes is established as an insurance investigator who sets an elaborate trap for Mac. I will be revealing little about the plot if I say that neither of these people is precisely as they seem.Watching the film, I imagined the trailer. Not the movie's real trailer, which I haven't seen, but one of those great 1950s trailers where big words in fancy typefaces come spinning out of the screen, asking us to Thrill! to risks atop the world's tallest building, and Gasp! at a daring bank robbery, and Cheer! as towering adventure takes us from New York to Scotland to Malaysia. A trailer like that would be telling only the simple truth. It also would perhaps include a few tantalizing shots of Zeta-Jones lifting her leather-clad legs in an athletic ballet designed to avoid the invisible beams of security systems. And shots of a thief hanging upside-down from a 70-story building. And an audacious raid through an underwater tunnel. And a priceless Rembrandt. And a way to steal $8 billion because of the Y2K bug. And so on.It works because it is made stylishly, because Connery and Zeta-Jones are enormously attractive actors, and because of the romantic tension between them. I got a letter the other day complaining about the age differences between the male and female leads in several recent pictures--and, to be sure, Connery at 69 and Zeta-Jones at 29 remember different wars. But the movie cannily establishes ground rules (Mac lectures that thievery is a business that permits no personal relationships), and so instead of questioning why they're erotically involved, we wish they would be.The plot, by Ron Bass and William Broyles, is put together like a Swiss watch that keeps changing time zones: It is accurate and misleading at once. The film consists of one elaborate caper sequence after another, and it rivals the Bond films in its climactic action sequence, which has Mac and Gin hanging from a string of holiday bulbs beneath the walkway linking the two towers of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur. The stunt and f/x work here does a good job of convincing us human beings are actually dangling precariously 70 stories in the air, and I for one am convinced that Zeta-Jones personally performs an earlier stunt, in which she treats an old wooden beam in Mac's Scottish castle as if it were a parallel bar at the Olympics. Most of the movie's action is just that--action--and not extreme violence.Watching Connery negotiate the nonsense of the plot is an education in acting: He treats every situation as if it is plausible, but not that big of a deal, and that sets the right tone. He avoids the smile in the voice that would give away the silliness of the plot. When he says, "I'm never late. If I'm late, it's because I'm dead," we reflect that some actors can get away with lines like that and others can't, and Connery is the leader of the first group.As for Zeta-Jones, I can only reflect, as I did while watching her in "The Mask Of Zorro," that while beautiful women are a dime a dozen in the movies, those with fire, flash and humor are a good deal more scarce. Taking her cue perhaps from Connery, she also plays a preposterous role absolutely straight. The co-stars and Jon Amiel, the director, respect the movie tradition they're working in, instead of condescending to it. There are scenes in this film when astounding revelations are made, and although I didn't believe them, I accepted them, which is more difficult, and enjoyable.

As I put in the title I did not find much in this film. I have to say that Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery are trying very hard to do something out of paper thin screen play and not very interesting plot.I tries to like this film but I could not. Since I have to fill ten lines of text let me just say that Cathrine Zeta-Jones is a fantastic actress and very good looking. I am sorry that she has so many health and other problems. There are rarely any people today who do not.The scene in the end with the trains was cute otherwise it was not that interesting film. I would recommend that you watch it if you do not have anything better to do in your life.