Enemy of the State

Definite Fun

The pacing of a thriller is crucial to its success. Enemy of the State gets that right. The movie is charged with energy throughout its run. The story plays on paranoia brought about by improvements in technology. While some of the shown tricks are well beyond what's currently possible, they didn't get in the way.

Will Smith gives the movie a good anchor. His laid-back mannerisms serve him well here as he negotiates the increasingly twisted maze being built by the government officials who hunt him. Gene Hackman is fine in his role of a spy who watches his life come tumbling down because a customer gets too much information from their trusted intermediary. I'm still not crazy about Jon Voight as a villain. I didn't think he was anything special in Mission: Impossible, and I didn't find him intriguingly menacing here. I suspect that I haven't seen him in a good role yet.

Nitpicking

• A high-tech satellite is prominently featured in segues. It's beeping audibly in Morse Code. Ignoring the fact that we wouldn't be "hearing" a satellite in the vacuum of space without a radio receiver, Morse Code seems a little inefficient for the bandwidth these satellites seem to have. Worse, it's beeping "CQ", the troll for conversation with anyone listening.
• Some scenes feature surveillance camera perspectives from places where characters just finished announcing that there are no such cameras.
• Reynolds, the Voight character, has someone important killed in a location that a few days of surveillance would've indicated was a very bad place to do so. He's already done enough homework to know that this spot has many good characteristics for the murder in question, but for the convenience of the plot, he misses that one crucial detail. He certainly seems to have the resources at his disposal to get this one right!