Review of Enemy of the State

Introduction

Despite being the usual audio/visual, cacophonous ballad we’d expect from The Bruckheimer/Scott stable. This fast, furious, at times epileptic thriller contains a number of neat Millennial touches and glibly facetious X-Files style paranoia.

Video

Dan Mindel’s galvanising MTV-style images are given a pristine digital sheen, and the slow-motion might come in handy trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on during some of the more chaotic action sequences, clearly products of the Bruckheimer school of machine-gun filmmaking.

Audio

The sound is crisp and clear, this will be a good film to test out that new subwoofer.

Features

As for extra features? Well, those kind folks at Disney have out-done themselves again, we get... nothing, nadda, zip. Apart from, of course, helpful Finnish subtitles. In otherwords, hopeless.

Conclusion

Will Smith turns in his first dynamic performance as the paranoid Hitchcockian every-man whose life becomes besieged by Government officials, headed by “some anal retentive with a serious vitamin a-deficiency” Jon Voight, searching for an incriminating digital tape. Smith works his role with an utterly convincing, apprehensive sheikh and exuberantly youthful penache, its all surface of course, but Smith is so much the star that the movie fires on all cylinders just watching him, merely going onto prove that Smith’s rise to fame is no fluke. Gene Hackman also has fun reprising his role in ‘The Conversation’ 20 years on. Sure Ian Hart, Jamie Kennedy, Tom Sizemore and Gabriel Byrne are wasted in bit-roles, the ending is a hectic bloodbath cop out of the worst kind and the overwhelming suspicion that our deepest fears about personal privacy are getting the shallow Hollywood action movie treatment are never even momentarily dispelled. But cigar-chomping and almost completely talent-less maniac Tony Scott has turned in one of his most coherent and balanced pictures to date. ‘Top Gun’? All is forgiven. Good one Tony, now all you have to do is make ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Alien’ and you don’t have to be bitter about your snatch of the gene-pool.