Review for Sneakers

Introduction

I’m trying to be selective when it comes to buying Blu-rays. I want to avoid the double-dip frenzy that I went on when DVD came and supplanted VHS. DVDs are still good enough for the casual watch, and I’m really only upgrading three categories of disc. If it’s a mega-blockbuster movie that has stood the test of time, that’s an easy investment to make, and then there are the films whose DVDs are so bad, that I was actually waiting for a DVD upgrade to double dip on them anyway (I get to ditch those letterbox transfers). The third category is the personal favourites, films that I fell in love with when I first saw them, and want in the best quality possible. The assumption I’m making is that I still love those films in the same way now as I did when I last purchased them. A perennial favourite of mine is the nineties tech thriller comedy Sneakers, and this year it finally got a Blu-ray release in the UK.


Martin Bishop makes an unusual living. He and his associates are hired to test security systems by trying to break them, and as you would expect from such an esoteric line of work, his associates are colourful characters to say the least. Crease is a former CIA agent, Mother is a gadgets wizard with his own line of conspiracy theories, Carl is a former delinquent and genius hacker, while Whistler is a blind computer genius. None of them really have pristine records, but when a couple of NSA agents come calling with a job for them, it’s Martin Bishop’s own past that rears its ugly head. He wasn’t always Martin Bishop. In a past life he was a college student named Martin Brice, who with his friend Cosmo went on a hacking spree that reallocated a whole lot of money. Cosmo got arrested, Martin did not, and he’s been on the run ever since. Now the government has caught up to him, but they’re actually offering to clear his name, if he and his group can liberate a certain bit of technology from the offices of a genius mathematician. But this bit of kit is something that any government would kill for, and it soon becomes apparent that Martin Bishop can’t trust anybody.

Picture

Sneakers gets a 1.85:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution in the VC-1 codec. It appears to me to be mastered from the same source as the original DVD release, as aside from the added resolution, and extra HD detail, the two seem nigh on identical. It is a Blu-ray quite obviously, the extra resolution is used, detail levels are much higher than the DVD, and there’s no immediate signs of compression. But it’s not a great Blu-ray. There’s varying degrees of softness through the film, the colour balance isn’t superb, with oversaturated reds and blues apparent. Dark detail is almost non-existent at times, which given a film that takes place mostly at night, isn’t ideal. Thankfully DNR hasn’t been applied and there is a rich sheen of film grain apparent throughout, but the film does seem flat. There’s even a moment of moiré at 36:31 on some angled window blinds. It is worlds better than the original DVD release, but I was still left unimpressed.

Sound

French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish along with Japanese, and more subtitles that you can shake a stick at, all in various forms of DTS Surround, are all well and good, but I guess that the readers of this site will be more interested in how the DTS-HD MA 5.1 English Surround track fares. Again I was not blown away by what the lossless surround format delivered, as it felt little different from the stereo track available on the DVD. This isn’t a film that really expresses itself through dynamic audio, as it’s mostly dialogue focused in front and centre. There is a bit of ambience, some stereo separation, but mostly the clarity is appreciated with Branford Marsalis and James Horner’s appealing music score.

Extras

Would you believe that this is the 20th Anniversary release of Sneakers? Judging by the barebones disc and the resurrected transfer, I sure wouldn’t. There isn’t even a trailer on this disc. But a nice progress bar appears when you press pause or advance or skip back, and apparently you can set your own bookmarks. I wish there was some way of getting rid of the bar.

Conclusion

I watched Sneakers last night, and I thought it was quaint. That’s never happened to me before. Ironically, in one aspect Sneakers is even more relevant than ever before, as one of its plot threads regards the US Government spying on its own citizens. But what used to be an appealing and engaging tech thriller now seems woefully out of touch. Last night I realised that I was watching what may be the last analogue hi-tech caper movie, with its characters using video and audio tape, ear pieces and microphones. In the last decade or so, the humble mobile phone has come and dated a whole lot of this genre of cinema. When a simple smart phone has a high resolution camera, and is packed with more apps than you can ever use, then all the paraphernalia put to work in Sneakers seems redundant. I think it’s just a matter of timing in this case, as the nineties seem not distant enough at this point to be called history. I can watch Wargames and its even older technology and not be jolted out of the viewing experience, but Sneakers is still close enough to be a familiar world.


The kind of story that Sneakers tells has also seen something of a revolution in recent cinema and television. These kinds of hi-tech thrillers are faster-paced, darker in tone, and usually have an ominous feel to them. The technology becomes part of the plot, rather than the plot itself, and there is usually a greater meaning to the story. Sneakers plays like a boys’ own adventure movie, and it plays it for fun and for laughs. That kind of movie doesn’t seem quite as in vogue anymore.


Sneakers is an ensemble piece, one with an all-star cast, and with great character writing that still appeals. It does have a tendency to belabour the character interactions to the detriment of the film’s pace, but with this cast it isn’t a bad thing. What struck me last night, as well as the relevance to current news items regarding government surveillance, was the byplay between Bishop and Cosmo, who appear as two sides of the same coin. They’re two men shaped by idealism. Bishop had to reconcile his idealism with the real world, but still has something of an anti-authoritarian twinkle in his eye, while Cosmo held onto his idealism and wound up corrupted by it. It’s a really nice bit of character development that still holds up in the film.


Sneakers isn’t the brilliant tech thriller that it once used to be. It’s been dated by modern technology, but it isn’t yet old enough to hold strong as a piece of cinema history. Maybe in another ten years I’ll look on it the that way I used to, and maybe in another ten years, it will get a Blu-ray release worthy of the name. This vanilla disc gets the movie out there in HD form, but other than that, it fails to do it justice.