Entrapment (1999)

Director: Jon Amiel

Writers: Ronald Bass, Michael Hertzberg, William Broyles Jr.

Composer: Christopher Young

Starring: Sean Conery, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ving Rhames, Will Patten, Maury Chaykin, Kevin McNally, Terry O'Neill, Madhav Sharma, David Yip, Tim Potter

More info: IMDB

Tagline: Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Then again, practice makes perfect.

Plot: An insurance agent is sent by her employer to track down and help capture an art thief.

My rating: 7/10

Will I watch it again?  Nah.  Twice is fine.

The last time I saw this was in the theater.  I liked it but it left me feeling like it was missing something.  Having just watched it again, I've got that same feeling.  I like the idea behind heist pictures but it's really hard to get them just right (for met, that is).  First of all you've got to like the characters who are pulling off the job.  Then you've got to like the reasons why they're doing it.  The final biggie in a successful heist film is the heist itself, not only in it's cinematic execution but it's also got to be believable.  Modern heist films tend to fail in the latter category because the tech is too technical (over-thought) or it's ridiculously over-the-top in that way of you've-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me.  ENTRAPMENT falls in the middle of that.  Stealing a tenth of a second (OK, it could be done I suppose), the intricate ballet of traversing through the laser beam field and so on.  The ending isn't as exciting as it should have been but it felt less important of a set piece than for what it served to get the characters to the conclusion.  Connery and Jones are very good and they've got great chemistry. 

The ending caught me by surprise (thanks to a crappy memory I'd forgotten most of the film) and I dug it.  It would probably seem a shame to do anything differently considering these two actors worked so well together.  Christopher Young's score was nice and beefy and the location shooting delivered great eye candy.  I dig the picture but there's that one little something that I can't put my finger on that's keeping me from rating it higher and letting my future self to watch it again.  I think I'd rather give another heist movie I haven't seen a shot before returning to this one even if that's 16 years from now.  The 20th Century Fox special edition DVD comes with a nice anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film, a neat menu where you can choose to view the DVD options normally, in night vision or in 3D view.  That's pretty cool.  The extras you get are the director's commentary, two deleted scenes with optional director's commentary, an alternate ending (which is a much better and emotional than what was used in the film), two trailers (both non-anamorphic widescreen), five TV spots (all non-anamorphic) and a 13-minute featurette which is largely a fluff piece wasting much of its time with clips from the film.