Entrapment (1999)

Dreadful Connery/Zeta-Jones rom-heist effort that just about saw off his career and made her bendy arse a star. 

This review was written 13 years too late

This dog of movie sees Sean Connery as a master thief (as opposed to a 60+ amateur – now there’s a film) being pursued by insurance investigator Catherine ZJ. ‘Cept she’s not an investigator but in fact a thief, who’s been drudging it out in a New York insurance office for years as she sets up her one big deal.

She needs Sean to help her. Or something. Or what? She seems to stroll into his life while the wily old Scot instantly detects her investigation of him and turns the tables on her in a yawn-yawn opening first act. She’s a thief. She’s not. She loves him. He doesn’t love her. He does. Blah. Who cares as the waffle trundles on as they work together in his loch-side castle, planning to rob a gold mask.

This heist shows the film’s barely “notorious” scene of ZJ bending and twisting through a series of invisible-to-her laser alarm beams. We get to see loads of her arse and body contorting and thrusting into the camera. My choice of words in the preceding sentence is deliberate, as crass as the filmmaking employed for the sequence, indeed, the whole thrill-less film. Whatever happened to tension, suspense and edge-of-the-seat set-pieces?

Sean and Car get their mask and escape. Who would have thought?

Connery’s performance is sadly a film too far, though coming just a few years after “The Rock“, where he comfortably and enjoyably pulled off the aged action hero. Here, it really shows. Really. No manner of carefully sculpted wig or angled, razor-neat beard give him the solid maturity he had in Michael Bay‘s OTT Alcatraz Island action-thriller. In “Entrapment“, he’s just old. He’s as befuddled as the dotty tourist he poses as in order to move unnoticed through the crowds.

You can’t blame him for the passing of time, but you can blame him for making the film. Hollywood’s old curmudgeon, who hates the system that pretty much made him, should have said no to this one. And no to casting Zeta-Jones too. They work together about as well as iron and wine. The romantic interludes are embarrassing, and while no one ever says, “You’re old enough to be my father” or some variation thereof, it’s going through the mind of every viewer. It’s more creepy than sexy, more pathetic than passionate.

Usually, I am a big defender of nonsense in films, arguing that I don’t need realism, in fact I go to escape it, like many of us. That said, it’s hard to ignore Sean Connery in a blue boiler suit marching through a Taiwan hotel basement disguised as a handy man. Or Catherine ZJ being able to escape the clutches of Taiwan’s police despite being witnessed by loads of them post-heist. Either they are dumb or she’s clever, but let’s face facts – a woman as beautiful and seen as she would find it hard to move unnoticed in East Asia.

Connery’s acting, while never first class, is dreadful here, really tired, like some saddo standup from the 70s doing a bad impression of him. I actually found myself feeling sorry for him. This film really was the end of the road for a great screen presence, a finality that was finally, and critically and commercial confirmed, two features and four years later with the reviled “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen“.

A couple of “What ifs”  haunt Connery’s career. The first is if he’d stayed on for one more Bond after “You Only Live Twice”: “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” – how much better would that film have been with Connery? But no. Jump forward a few decades and Connery said no to Gandalf in Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. What a fitting end to a life in film that would have been.

Instead, we have this, “Finding Forrester“, and “The League…”

Catherine has, and will have more, countless opportunities to shape her career. But this was almost Sean’s swansong. A swansong that made 200,000 USD + at the box office.

So what do I know, eh? Well, shite when I see it.