Enemy of the State (1998)

 Enemy of the State is one of those movies that I would come across while channel surfing then watch a few scenes, chuckle, before dismissing it and moving on to something more serious like a rerun of Laverne and Shirley or something. However, when teaching a film course, I had decided to show Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), which like Enemy of the State, stars Gene Hackman. The Conversation is a paranoia thriller with themes involving murder, betrayal, conspiracy, and invasion of privacy. It’s a brilliant film that seems all the more impressive when you consider that it was Coppola second best film that year behind the director’s other little-known work, The Godfather, Part II.

In researching The Conversation, I kept coming across comments about Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State being somehow an unacknowledged sequel, which I at first dismissed as downright stupid—then I thought about it a bit. Like The Conversation, Enemy of the State involves the specter of pervasive surveillance seeping into every fiber of our day to day lives. And, as stated, both star Hackman.

The overall cast of Enemy of the State is impressive with Will Smith at the center as well as then rising actors Seth Green, Jack Black, Scott Caan, Jake Busey among others, including the always reliable Jon Voight, an incredible actor who has fallen into the typecast of menacing WASP who does bad things for what he believes to be the greater good. Then again, maybe he was just playing himself. There is also the added bonus of major actors like Jason Robards and Gabriel Byrne appearing in what basically adds up to cameo roles.

The women in the cast include Regina King, who delivers an energetic performance as Smith wife although she is given woefully little to do, and Lisa Bonet as Smith’s ex-girlfriend and contact source, but her character provides more of a point of conflict than it does a person. 

Smith plays attorney Robert Clayton Dean, a regular guy caught up in a web of conspiracy. Smith’s talent has always been his relatability, and here it serves to help the audience connect with his character’s struggle against a den of vipers after unknowingly receiving a  McGuffin: evidence of a political assassination, which leads to him become the target of those assassins. Hackman’s reclusive “Brill” reluctantly helps Dean get to the bottom of the conspiracy theory, telling him, “It's more than a theory with me. I'm a former conspirer.”

Whereas The Conversation presents the idea of unwanted surveillance as a plausibly deniable fevered dream that we can convince ourselves is not happening, Enemy of the State just whips it right out. Everything you do is being observed somewhere through overhead satellites, phones, and bugs planted in your underwear. It’s a movie as a subtle as a jackhammer, especially with Voight playing (delightfully) the maniacal and corrupt politician, Thomas Brian Reynolds. Yes, while the film was directed by the blue filters addicted Mr. Scott, it has all the greasy fingerprints of its producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who has all the subtlety of a guy counting hundred dollar bills out loud while walking through a bad neighborhood. That said, there is a weird kinship between Coppola’s and Scott’s films if you’re willing to buy into the theory that Hackman’s Harry Caul from The Conversation has been going by the name “Brill” during the intervening decades for Enemy of the State, which makes sense give the paranoid themes of both movies.

And yes, I did reference Laverne and Shirley at the beginning of this essay because Cindy William has a pivotal role in The Conversation. And speaking of sitcom references, there is the bonus of a nude scene with Gomer Pyle’s Lou Ann Poovie (Elizabeth MacRae) as The Conversation’s femme fatale.

Scott’s film also gives clears nods to Coppola’s by not only using an image that is clearly Hackman’s Harry Caul for Brill’s profile photo, but there is also a scene set in D.C.’s Mount Vernon Square that mimics the opening of The Conversation—lacking only a mime. 

Imagining a kinship between Enemy of the State and The Conversation is like discovering that Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty are siblings or that John David Washington is Denzel’s son (yes, I may be stupid) or that Tyne Daly and Tim Daly are sister and brother (I am definitely stupid). Yes, Tony Scott’s film might best be viewed as something like the love child of Coppola’s film—conceived through the passions of screenwriter David Marconi’s history with spy thriller and games between cats and mice and the emerging technology during the mid-90s.

It could be argued that Enemy of the State is too good looking a film to fully enjoy on a VHS tape and CRT television, which I would agree with. However, it is just not a very good film. Yes, Tony Scott’s film looks gorgeous even when seen through a limiting format, and its cast is enjoyable, and there are more than a few clever lines of dialogue. However, this just isn’t a good movie. Enemy of the State‘s violent and bloody ending is typical of 1990s thrillers, and I would be a hypocrite to complain about that alone, being that I am an avowed Tarantino fanboy, yet Tony Scott’s arrangement seems like painting by numbers. Yes, the tension between the corrupt feds in a gun barrel to gun barrel standoff with mobsters in the back of a restaurant rachets up the tension, but it feels like empty calories.

Looking at Enemy of the State as an unacknowledged sequel does add to watching the film, and I certainly may not have had any interest in sitting through it otherwise. It’s a dumb film, but it was fun to watch. Smith, Hackman, King, and Voight are absolutely captivating, so even without my excuse, watching it was not a complete waste of time. We all go through a bag of chips every once and a while and enjoy it.