Entrapment

Familiarity

Entrapment came out nine weeks before John McTiernan's Thomas Crown Affair. Both had leading men who'd played James Bond. Both had a sexy insurance agent sent after the leading man. Both had a man back at the office trying to win them over and keep them in line at the same time. Heck, there's even a slight facial resemblance between Denis Leary and Will Patton. I was certain of the similarity of the two plots for a while, but I realized a bit late that the movie had tricked me. Of course, had I seen Entrapment when it hit theaters instead of over a year later, I wouldn't have been as likely to make these connections. Of course, Entrapment plays on the expectations set up in the trailer, leading to my incorrect assessment of the opening scenes.

Set Pieces

As far as I can tell, the selling points of Entrapment are a few set pieces: the opening caper, the laser dance, and the Malaysian break-in. Should I include a romance between Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery on the list of draws? No. All are well done, entertaining, and involve fairly sexy gadgets, even if I'm extremely suspicious of their feasability. The rest of the film is comparative fluff, and wouldn't be missed if it were on the cutting room floor, except that the travelogue aspect would be lacking. The script does little to flatter the acting talents of Connery and Zeta-Jones, but it's interesting anyway.

Nitpicking

• A device that deactivates alarm systems just by guessing numbers in the same room as a touchpad is a nice dream, but I fail to see how that could hope to work. What non-movie purpose could be served by having a radio receiver in the alarm control? More importantly, why do these things always seem to generate random numbers along the way? As long as it's a brute force search, why not be sequential about it and use less memory?
• Why are movie characters so cavalier about what they discuss in broad daylight? When Gin and Mac are walking from the taxi to the hideout in Kuala Lumpur, they're discussing the robbery in non- hushed tones on a busy street. Isn't that a bit risky?
• I'm amused by the thought of a plot built around the Y2K rollover. Why do they have to spoil it by referring to it as the millennium? More peculiar, why isn't there a technician in a headset waiting at each of the mainframes as they go offline?
• Interfering with time synchronization is one of the movie's more interesting gimmicks. At least it doesn't take as much work as the GPS disturbance in Goldeneye. If this bank has such a neato-keen dedicated network, why don't they sync time from that? Even if New York was getting bogus time, the rest of the network would stay in lock-step. More perplexing, Gin sets the time transmitter to 11:00 on December 31, 1999. This is a bit of a problem, since the plan is to tamper with New York time starting one hour before the rollover in Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur is neither in the same time zone nor the exact opposite time zone of New York. Unless she set the transmitter to Kuala Lumpur time, this is a goof. I also doubt very much that a device like that would show "AM" and "PM", so it should be on a twenty-four hour clock and show "23:00" instead of "11:00". Since the United States is fairly rare in using a twelve-hour clock, this would also make the movie more palatable to an international audience.