Enemy of the State DVD Will Smith Gene Hackman

Description

Enemy of the State
Will Smith (Actor), Gene Hackman (Actor), Tony Scott (Director) Rated: R (Restricted) Format: DVD

Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) is a lawyer with a wife and family whose happily normal life is turned upside down after a chance meeting with a college buddy (Jason Lee) at a lingerie shop. Unbeknownst to the lawyer, he’s just been burdened with a videotape of a congressman’s assassination. Hot on the tail of this tape is a ruthless group of National Security Agents commanded by a belligerently ambitious fed named Reynolds (Jon Voight). Using surveillance from satellites, bugs, and other sophisticated snooping devices, the NSA infiltrates every facet of Dean’s existence, tracing each physical and digital footprint he leaves. Driven by acute paranoia, Dean enlists the help of a clandestine former NSA operative named Brill (Gene Hackman), and Enemy of the State kicks into high-intensity hyperdrive.

Teaming up once again with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Top Gun director Tony Scott demonstrates his glossy style with clever cinematography and breakneck pacing. Will Smith proves that there’s more to his success than a brash sense of humor, giving a versatile performance that plausibly illustrates a man cracking under the strain of paranoid turmoil. Hackman steals the show by essentially reprising his role from The Conversation–just imagine his memorable character Harry Caul some 20 years later. Most of all, the film’s depiction of high-tech surveillance is highly convincing and dramatically compelling, making this a cautionary tale with more substance than you’d normally expect from a Scott-Bruckheimer action extravaganza.

Hot Hollywood favorite Will Smith (MEN IN BLACK, INDEPENDENCE DAY) stars with Academy Award(R)-winner Gene Hackman (Best Actor, UNFORGIVEN, 1992, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, 1971) in a high-powered suspense thriller where nonstop action meets cutting-edge technology. Robert Clayton Dean (Smith) is a successful Washington, D.C., attorney who — without his knowledge — is given a video that ties a top official of the National Security Agency (Oscar(R)-winner Jon Voight, Best Actor, 1978, COMING HOME) to a political murder. Instantly, every aspect of Dean’s once-normal life is targeted by a lethal team of skilled NSA surveillance operatives, who wage a relentless, ultra-high-tech campaign to discredit him and retrieve the incriminating evidence. Also featuring Regina King (JERRY MAGUIRE, BOYZ N THE HOOD) in an impressive, star-studded cast — get ready for the action to explode as Dean desperately races to reclaim his life and prove his innocence before it’s too late.

Actors: Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Lisa Bonet, Regina King
Directors: Tony Scott
Writers: David Marconi
Format: Multiple Formats, Closed-captioned, Color, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround)
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Studio: Touchstone Home Entertainment
Run Time: 132 minutes

What would otherwise just have been another pretty good action/suspense film, took on an eerie resonance in the post 9/11 era–the legislation that the Jon Voigt character was willing to kill to get passed had more than a faint aroma of “The Patriot Act”– and I’m surprised that more reviewers haven’t mentioned that. As an aside, along the lines of the eerie resonance of this movie in the wake of 9/11, it gave my wife and I a bit of a chill down our spines when Gene Hackman’s character revealed by “hacking” into the NSA computer that the Jon Voigt character’s birthday was “9/11”–an eerie coincidence three years before 9/11/01.

Enemy of The State is another one of Jerry Bruckheimer’s mid 90’s action extravaganzas. He reunites with Tony Scott to bring us this action flick about government coverups and how technology is used to basically track every aspect of your life. The movie is about a lawyer who is unwillingly thrown into a wild cat and mouse chase. A congressman is murdered near a reservoir where research is done on migratory geese. So, unknowingly, the whole thing is caught on tape and ends up in the hands of a nerdy and young Jason Lee. He realizes what he has in his possession and during a foot chase he bumps into his old friend played by Will Smith and secretly drops the tape in his bag. Now Will Smith’s character is thrown into a world of espionage without knowing why he is being hunted. He meets up with Brill, played by Gene Hackman, an ex NSA agent who ends up helping him. Hackman basically plays a reincarnation of his character in Coppola’s The Conversation. The movie is directed at a fast pace by Tony Scott, and it’s an overall entertaining action flick.

The “making of” featurette was actually more extensive than I was expecting. They talk more about the gadgets used in the film versus the actual movie, but overall I found it to be interesting. All the interviews were done back during the making of the movie and it was a pretty extensive behind the scenes for what the movie is. One thing I found extremely interesting was that they talked about a scene where Will Smith is chased by cars in an underground tunnel in his bathrobe. In reality, the cars didn’t fit into the tunnel so they had do take the cars apart and weld them back together in the tunnel. The entire scene was maybe a minute long! I just found it interesting that all that work was done for maybe a blip of action. Anyway, the next featurette is basically some on set footage. Overall the two featurettes do justice for what this movie is.

An episode of PBS’ Nova titled “Spy Factory” reports that the film’s portrayal of the NSA’s capabilities are fiction: although the agency can intercept transmissions, connecting the dots is difficult. However, in 2001, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, who was appointed to the position during the release of the film, told CNN’s Kyra Phillips that “I made the judgment that we couldn’t survive with the popular impression of this agency being formed by the last Will Smith movie.” James Risen wrote in his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration that Hayden “was appalled” by the film’s depiction of the NSA, and sought to counter it with a PR campaign on behalf of the agency.

In June 2013 the NSA’s PRISM and Boundless Informant programs for domestic and international surveillance were uncovered by The Guardian and Washington Post as the result of information provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. This information revealed capabilities such as collection of Internet browsing, email and telephone data of not only every American, but citizens of other nations as well. The Guardian’s John Patterson opined that Hollywood depictions of NSA surveillance, including Enemy of the State and Echelon Conspiracy, had “softened” up the American public to “the notion that our spending habits, our location, our every movement and conversation, are visible to others whose motives we cannot know”.

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DVD, Case and insert all in near mint condition. Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Production featurette, filmmaker featurette and theatrical trailer.