Entrapment (1999)

Wonderful character development!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

After a famous and very expensive painting is stolen by a hi-tech criminal, an insurance employee is sent by her company to spy on him. Persuaded by her looks, the thief agrees to make a team with her in a new, even mightier theft, using state of the art technology.It's a movie designed to impress the viewers, with its fancy gimmicks and accessories while taking advantage of two good actors in an attempt to create a suspenseful atmosphere. It manages to do so in an important manner but it is simply let down by an average plot and bad dialog. They are very simple, linear and predictable, making the sequences between the robberies a real pain. You can imagine it as a soap opera, disguised as a film, fact which is simply unacceptable in this type of movie where the main characters are supposedly robbing very high value objects. The producers also tried to do something different with the finale but they simply failed to impress or at least provide a bit of satisfaction. Besides these problems, the whole technology part is way too exaggerated, making a lot of aspects of it seem improbable or impossible, thus spoiling a bit the excitement.Unfortunately, it's an average movie which had a good idea and two good actors but failed to implement it and link all the aspects into an uniform final product.

Entrapment casts Catherine Zeta-Jones as an insurance investigator anxious to earn her spurs in the business by capturing notorious thief Sean Connery. Connery is looking every bit sixty plus years of age, but he's in good shape and while he lives pretty good as is, he's always up for a challenge.Zeta-Jones is sent by her boss Will Patton to capture Connery. But Connery is up to anything she can throw at him. Her best bet could be to capture him in the act of pulling a job, but after a while just who is leading who on.Entrapment boasts some nice location cinematography in Connery's native Scotland and in Kuala Lampur where the big caper takes place. It's a bank job, but in the computer age it's something different if you're going after a big score. Connery showing his age asks quite innocently 'where's the loot?'How will it go for Zeta-Jones? Well bad guys seem to have more fun and Patton is such a drip. Ving Rhames is in this as well and his role is most ambiguous. The aging Sean Connery still has some great moves in Entrapment.

A movie with a preposterous plot, exotic locations, absurd action sequences, and so much chemistry between attractive actors that we don't care. Gets by well enough on style and star chemistry and the basic allure of watching a tightly-planned caper unfold. A certain sunny sloppiness almost redeems Jon Amiel's throwback caper flick.Connery and Zeta-Jones not only look great together, they work well together, too.Connery and Zeta-Jones are such fun to watch together it almost doesn't matter how little sense the movie makes -- and their relationship is far more gleefully perverse, weirdly chivalrous and surprisingly interesting than the trailer makes it look.Cleverly updates the formula with a sprinkling of fun, fin-DE-millennium touches.Entrapment luxuriates in the best Hollywood big bucks can buy: superb sets and cinematography, spectacular locations, expensive stars. During the opening credits the camera glides through a romanticised Manhattan skyline. The steel and chrome gleam, the lights of the skyscrapers are digital jewels and the frame of the screen is dynamically pierced at odd angles by a laser-like red beam. This sequence holds out a tantalising promise for the movie, particularly when the camera rests on a sinuous cat-burglar entering a high, tightly shut window with elegant ease. We expect an exciting, sleek and slick caper movie, something like To Catch a Thief (1954) or at least (let's not be too greedy) Arabesque (1966). It's not the stars' fault that Entrapment is disappointing. Sean Connery gets the Cary Grant treatment here, made the object of his co-star's desire. Catherine Zeta-Jones chases him just as surely and shrewdly as Audrey Hepburn chased Grant in Charade (1963). Given the 40-year age gap between them, her instigation is presumably meant to make their romance less risible, but it's an unnecessary precaution. Close-ups reveal Connery's skin is losing the battle with time, but his appeal was never really based on youth.Connery's stardom rests on his ability to represent a man completely at ease with his masculinity and his sexuality better than any other star of his generation. There was always something a bit suspect about prettier men like Paul Newman (cf. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958) while tougher guys such as Clint Eastwood seemed too stiff to be turned on by anything but seaminess (Tightrope, 1984). Connery, however, deploys his physical size, gruff and commanding voice, a glance both sure and sly and a stillness that can pounce into graceful movement at any moment to project a sexuality so confident it can afford to be nonchalant and playful. We are easily convinced that what Zeta-Jones wants from him, give or take a couple of billion dollars, is delivery on the promise of a rough good time.Zeta-Jones more than holds her own here. Connery may be the object of her desire, but Zeta-Jones is meant to be the object of ours. The sight of her leotard-clad figure practising gymnastics in order to avoid the burglar alarm's lasers is more spectacular and pleasurable than the action set pieces. She emerges from Entrapment a full-blown star, flirting with such intelligent sultriness not even a man of Connery's strength can resist. Good alone but even better together, the two have an undoubted chemistry.Entrapment aspires to be nothing more than a bit of glamorous nonsense, but although it has done all right by the glamour, it has perhaps done too well by the nonsense. Very badly structured, the story begins to feel ripped off half way through, its maze of double-crossings never delivering a narrative payoff. At the unbelievable and tacked-on ending, even a cynic might feel a twinge of discomfort at the lack of even a half-hearted gesture towards a moral rationale for the action. We're meant to root for these thieves just because they look gorgeous, seem meant for each other and are good at their work.The fact that the combination of sex and capital as spectacle is thought to need no other rationale says a lot about millennial culture, and would make a good subject for another movie. But this is by-numbers genre work which has forgotten a few sums. Entrapment fails as a caper film because it neglects that fundamental ingredient - a credible plot, evidently something even the biggest chequebooks in Hollywood can no longer guarantee.

Virginia Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones) works for an insurance company, and suspects old master thief Robert MacDougal (Sean Connery) is responsible for the latest improbable theft of a high price artwork. She tracks him down to propose stealing a valuable mask.This has a very weak cat and mouse game between CZJ and Conner. It's more innuendo and sexual gamesmanship than actual compelling story. None of it is worthwhile. The two leads would work better as a grandfather granddaughter team, and has as much sexual chemistry as that. It's an excuse for CZJ to roll around in skin tight clothing and get caught naked. As for the capers and exotic locations, they are a bit of fun distraction. It's kind of sad to see Sean Connery in this.