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WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
Enemy of the State
Action Thriller / English / 1998
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Was lent to me by a co-worker.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It's been a while since I've done a review, and in all honesty this isn't the first movie I've seen that I've failed to stop by and review, nor is it the first movie lent to me by this co-worker that I could have reviewed. However it is the first movie in a while that's reminded me exactly why I love movies.
Nowadays people can film themselves vertically performing some detestably acted farce about cooking hacks or pranks or contacting the dead or some other nauseating **** that leaves no surprises that the political scene is as ****ed as it is nowadays and they get 48 million views worth of ad revenue to line their pockets with. Meanwhile I struggle to think of the last real movie-going experience since Inception that really erased any doubts that filmmaking is a craft worthy of appreciation. I didn't think there was any reason to doubt, but I haven't felt much motivation to check out the latest Disney cash-grab to pollute the marketing space. Oh what's that? Disney+ shows aren't getting physical releases? And Disney is more or less the final boss of copyright totalitarianism? Certainly internet pirates have their work cut out for them.
What I mean to say is that sometimes I look at my shelf full of my favorite movies and question whether they were disposable experiences, just this increasingly stale waft of cinema captured in a jar that I keep trying to inhale with diminishing returns, and I get to the point where I don't even watch them. Even today I had these movies on my desk and I was tempted to watch old Youtube videos instead.
Thankfully I watched Enemy of the State and I had... a completely serviceable experience. Unlike the disgustingly low standards of videography that permeates places like Youtube, Enemy of the State has 3 simple goals and it accomplishes them well:
1. Be a fast-paced action thriller.
2. Have the premise be a social commentary on state surveillance.
3. Give us the turn-around, have the bad guy invade and ruin everything in our protagonist's life and then when he's driven into a corner, give him a taste of his own medicine.
Right out of the gate we establish our villain as the stereotypical deep-state politician with the resources to assassinate his opposition leaving only circumstantial evidence for the libertarian conspiracy theorists.
Next we have Will Smith, playing Will Smith, being the guy in the wrong place in the wrong time, ending up with the only known evidence of one of Big Bad's hits. Queue endless Seth-Green-at-a-computer-saying-addresses-superimposed-by-fake-software.
Not just Seth Green either, but Jack Black, and even Jason Lee get in on the action. It's cool to see recognizable faces. I don't really have an issue with the acting from any of them, although the writing, while unsubtle in it's political message, is most annoying when it gives Will Smith dumb lines, like his correction about being called a "scheister". Oh man, you really showed that mobster by correcting his casual usage of the word "scheister".
I can appreciate new-future technology and fortunately most of what's shown for surveillance in the movie is at least plausible from a 90s perspective. The government's definitely not so capable that is can tap literally everything, like the movie would like you to believe, but the real bull**** moment is when they're reviewing some restaurant's external cameras and rotate the camera 90 degrees around it's subject in pre-recorded video.
That got a laugh outta me, but fortunately they backpedalled almost immediately and said that what was shown was only what the software "hypothesized" may be seen in a 3-dimensional space. Nice save.
The 3D mapping of the bag in that scene, to determine that something was slipped inside of it, is only barely plausible now considering it takes days for machine learning programs to memorize a face with far more than a few seconds of footage to build a 3D profile from.
Overall there's not much to say, while not a classic itself, it is an example of now-classic 90s action thriller sensibilities. Constant tension, a very focused plot development, easy to like smart-alleck protagonists with love-to-hate big bads bound for their karmic comeuppance. I miss it. I wanna watch more movies.
Nowadays people can film themselves vertically performing some detestably acted farce about cooking hacks or pranks or contacting the dead or some other nauseating **** that leaves no surprises that the political scene is as ****ed as it is nowadays and they get 48 million views worth of ad revenue to line their pockets with. Meanwhile I struggle to think of the last real movie-going experience since Inception that really erased any doubts that filmmaking is a craft worthy of appreciation. I didn't think there was any reason to doubt, but I haven't felt much motivation to check out the latest Disney cash-grab to pollute the marketing space. Oh what's that? Disney+ shows aren't getting physical releases? And Disney is more or less the final boss of copyright totalitarianism? Certainly internet pirates have their work cut out for them.
What I mean to say is that sometimes I look at my shelf full of my favorite movies and question whether they were disposable experiences, just this increasingly stale waft of cinema captured in a jar that I keep trying to inhale with diminishing returns, and I get to the point where I don't even watch them. Even today I had these movies on my desk and I was tempted to watch old Youtube videos instead.
Thankfully I watched Enemy of the State and I had... a completely serviceable experience. Unlike the disgustingly low standards of videography that permeates places like Youtube, Enemy of the State has 3 simple goals and it accomplishes them well:
1. Be a fast-paced action thriller.
2. Have the premise be a social commentary on state surveillance.
3. Give us the turn-around, have the bad guy invade and ruin everything in our protagonist's life and then when he's driven into a corner, give him a taste of his own medicine.
Right out of the gate we establish our villain as the stereotypical deep-state politician with the resources to assassinate his opposition leaving only circumstantial evidence for the libertarian conspiracy theorists.
Next we have Will Smith, playing Will Smith, being the guy in the wrong place in the wrong time, ending up with the only known evidence of one of Big Bad's hits. Queue endless Seth-Green-at-a-computer-saying-addresses-superimposed-by-fake-software.
Not just Seth Green either, but Jack Black, and even Jason Lee get in on the action. It's cool to see recognizable faces. I don't really have an issue with the acting from any of them, although the writing, while unsubtle in it's political message, is most annoying when it gives Will Smith dumb lines, like his correction about being called a "scheister". Oh man, you really showed that mobster by correcting his casual usage of the word "scheister".
I can appreciate new-future technology and fortunately most of what's shown for surveillance in the movie is at least plausible from a 90s perspective. The government's definitely not so capable that is can tap literally everything, like the movie would like you to believe, but the real bull**** moment is when they're reviewing some restaurant's external cameras and rotate the camera 90 degrees around it's subject in pre-recorded video.
That got a laugh outta me, but fortunately they backpedalled almost immediately and said that what was shown was only what the software "hypothesized" may be seen in a 3-dimensional space. Nice save.
The 3D mapping of the bag in that scene, to determine that something was slipped inside of it, is only barely plausible now considering it takes days for machine learning programs to memorize a face with far more than a few seconds of footage to build a 3D profile from.
Overall there's not much to say, while not a classic itself, it is an example of now-classic 90s action thriller sensibilities. Constant tension, a very focused plot development, easy to like smart-alleck protagonists with love-to-hate big bads bound for their karmic comeuppance. I miss it. I wanna watch more movies.