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ENEMY OF THE STATE Send This Review to a Friend
If you think you are reading this in privacy, don't be too sure. The ability to monitor everyone in the slick, high-tech "Enemy of the State" is downright frightening. Sophisticated bugging, the capability of intruding into banking records with the click of computer keys, the surveillance via satellite to follow a target everywhere, the tapping of phone conversations with ease---all of this and more highlight the plot that springs from the murder of a Congressman (Jason Robards) who won't play ball with a National Security Agency plan to pass a law that would all but wipe out civil liberties when it comes to privacy.
This is one of the best thrillers in years, even allowing for some of the dramatic foolishness that usually creeps into paranoid conspiracy films. A man whose innocent photography of nature inadvertently captures the murder on video is suddenly the target of the high security conspirator (Jon Voight) and his operatives who are after the tape, which ends up being slipped into a shopping bag of an unwitting lawyer with troubles of his own. Soon Will Smith as the lawyer is battling for life, as is Gene Hackman as a free- lance expert in the monitoring business with whom the attorney has been associated.
Director Tony Scott and screenwriter David Marconi keep the action swift amid an almost non-stop barrage of technical ploys, computers and other electronic gadgets that welcome us to the world of eavesdropping and the murderous tracking of anyone who gets in the way. This is a rare thriller that entertains us royally but delivers a message, a warning against where all this super-technology can be leading. A Touchstone Pictures release.
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