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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 21.21%
Worth A Look: 36.36%
Just Average: 25.25%
Pretty Crappy: 9.09%
Sucks: 8.08%
8 reviews, 51 user ratings
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| Thomas Crown Affair, The (1999) |
by Erik Childress
"Remake a Fun Grown-Up Thriller"
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The Thomas Crown Affair (***) – Pierce Brosnan must have been genetically harvested to play three roles during his career – Remington Steele, James Bond (eventually), and Thomas Crown. You’ll realize that by watching the remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway opus.You can’t imagine anyone else playing this role and that helps give credibility to what easily could have been just a riff on his take of James Bond. Rene Russo also does a good job as the sly investigator, proving once again (after Tin Cup) that perhaps she is coming into her own as a very fine actress. It doesn’t hurt that the gentlemen in the audience will finally get their first full glimpse of Rene el grande delicto, but she proves to have more sex appeal than Sean Connery’s nemesis earlier this year. This is the movie that Entrapment wanted to be, which essentially was also just an updating of the original Thomas Crown with an older thief, an even younger insurance investigator, and a lame twist ineptly acted by hotpants Catherine Zeta-Jones. It’s not that Entrapment was such a bad movie (I gave it 2 ˝ Stars), but it felt like a by-the-numbers Hollywood screenplay. Thomas Crown doesn’t. It feels like a real story with real people and not just characterizations, even though it easily could have been. Director John McTiernan (most known for two of the best in the action genre – Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October – along with the third Die Hard film, Predator, and the severely underrated Last Action Hero.) keeps it moving with conviction, trusting his audience not just to get caught up in the elaborate heist sequence, but in its characters as well where the real tension in the movie lies. Is the whole thing just a game to the two of them, or are the emotions between them so strong that we want, along with Thomas Crown, that he be able to trust her completely. I was surprised to see that this was the real heart of the movie and not just heist after heist after heist. There is one heist early on – and the whole film builds off that. Not to demean the heist by any means, because it is a truly superior one, revealing layer after subtle layer throughout the film (without the mind-numbing use of repetitive split-screen as the 1968 film) as the audience is allowed to discover the clues along with the police leading up to its cleverly fun climax that for one had me fooled and had the audience cheering. The final scene of the film I had problems with, as it kind of cut across everything the movie was trying to be about. It felt like the one true cheat in a film full of bluffs.But other than the final 5 minutes, I was very entertained by The Thomas Crown Affair and recommend it, whether you’ve seen Entrapment or not. (Trivia: This is the second time McTiernan has worked with Brosnan in a movie. Any guesses for the first time? Nomads in 1986.)
link directly to this review at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=805&reviewer=198
originally posted: 02/15/00 18:30:45
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USA
06-Aug-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
19-Aug-1999
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