Honor among sophisticated thieves at play in 'Entrapment'

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Movies can make you root for anybody, even criminals. Thieves, bank robbers, gangsters, con men -- you have sympathy for them, especially if they come in the form of Paul Newman, Robert Redford or Robert De Niro.

Entrapment is one such movie. How can any moviegoer, man or woman, resist Sean Connery as a dashing, charismatic art thief whose swift motion and sly dexterity display little sign of age? And as his thieving accomplice, we have 29-year-old Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones from The Mask of Zorro and Titanic (the TV film, not the James Cameron juggernaut), who illuminates the screen with her beauty, catlike agility and intelligence.

Entrapment wants us to appreciate stealing as an art, and thieves, not as villainous rogues, but smooth, crafty artistes. Only a handful of films have such ambition, and they mostly belong in the past. To Catch a Thief, with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and Shalimar, with Rex Harrison and Sylvia Miles, are among them. But no such effort has ever been made again for decades until this new action-adventure film that Connery himself coproduced.

From the beginning, the film promises demonstrations of high- technology and expertise as we see a masked burglar performs the seemingly impossible feat of entering a Manhattan high-rise building and stealing a priceless Rembrandt.

We are next introduced to Virginia Baker (Zeta-Jones) -- called by her nickname, Gin -- an insurance investigator who works for the company that will stand to lose US$24 million over the theft. She is convinced that the thief's methods indicate the characteristics of the legendary art thief Robert "Mac" MacDougal (who later materializes as Connery), who has never been captured. Gin tries to persuade her supervisor, Hector Cruz (Will Patton), to send her on a mission to catch MacDougal.

"Two agents have been sent to get him," Cruz says. "And they have never been heard of since."

"Those agents are men," retorts Gin.

Gin goes to England, where her target is believed to be based. But before she can discover Mac, he discovers her first.

"Why are you following me?" the thief coolly asks as he suddenly appears in Gin's hotel room, his face obscured by shadows, Deep Throat-style.

Gin somehow convinces Mac that she is herself a thief, and offers him her collaboration to steal a $40 million Chinese mask from a London museum exhibition. They leave for his secluded castle in Scotland to go through the elaborate preparations for a most calculated heist.

"Remember," Mac lectures, in that famous Connery idiolect, "there are alwaysh shurprishes."

But Mac also has to learn a thing or two about dealing with someone like Gin. He does his best brushing off Gin's initial attempt to seduce him, by introducing his code of conduct: no romantic involvement with a partner in crime. But before he knows it, the two have grown an attraction toward each other, as they follow the Chinese-mask theft with another, more daring, $8 billion electronic robbery at a multinational corporation located in the world's tallest tower in Kuala Lumpur, exactly at the dawn of the new millennium.

Entrapment is a spectacle of heart-stopping stunts set at various international locales and flavored by the May-December affair between the two main characters. Director Jon Amiel has never made an action flick before, his previous efforts being the Civil War period drama Sommersby (1992) and the detective thriller Copycat (1995). But he is proven deft at handling the suspenseful scenes, particularly the climactic high-wire chase sequence at the famed Petronas Tower.

It's the writing department that is a bit neglected, even though the film has two of the most prominent Hollywood screen writers, Ronald Bass and William Broyles. Bass, who won an Oscar for cowriting Rain Man, is a prolific scribe who has penned scripts of successful films with strong woman characters such as Sleeping with the Enemy, Dangerous Minds, My Best Friend's Wed ding, and Stepmom, and is currently working on Steven Spielberg's Memoirs of a Geisha. Meanwhile, Broyles received an Academy Award nomination as the co-scriptwriter of the male-dominated, cathartic Apollo 13.

The duo's combined effort result in amusing exchanges between the two principal characters, verbal and otherwise. And they cleverly infuse the event of the millennium into the film's climax, which is teasingly indicated from the start by occurring countdowns. But they fail to provide a plausible plot, and further damage the film with an illogical twist in the end that takes away the movie's credibility.

What is left is the chance to marvel at Connery's lasting persona, an accomplished action star in his seventies far, far beyond the shadow of 007, and still a convincing lady-killer, even for women 40 years his junior. Meanwhile, Zeta-Jones, al though sounding a little whiny in her American accent, projects an incomparable mix of sultriness and intellect. They are the main attraction in a film that is a perfect example of escapism at its best, but not much else.