Enemy of the State

I revisited Enemy of the State the other night and honestly, it still cooks. This is late '90s glossy paranoia at its finest, and Tony Scott knows how to keep things tense without letting it get too self-serious. The plot’s classic wrong-man stuff: Will Smith stumbles into a political conspiracy and basically gets chewed up by a surveillance state that’s both hilarious and kind of prescient when you realize how much of our real lives it almost predicted.

Will Smith is right in his prime here. He mixes nervous energy with just enough swagger to make you actually root for him, instead of just wringing your hands about how outmatched he is. Gene Hackman, too, gets to play the grumpy ex-spook, and you can feel the burnt-out wisdom behind every line. Their dynamic is the movie’s biggest strength; Hackman’s entire attitude could’ve been cribbed from his role in The Conversation, which I totally feel was intentional.

The cinematography is very of its time: lots of saturated blues and oranges, shaky handheld, and those rapid zooms that make every chase feel more urgent than maybe it really is. The editing’s fast but not Michael Bay-level exhausting, which is a plus. Still, some of the surveillance tech and computer graphics feel hilariously ancient now, which undercuts the tension a little if you’re watching in 2024.

Pacing-wise, it’s mostly a sprint, sometimes to the point where it barely gives you time to care about any character who isn’t Smith or Hackman. That makes it fun but also kind of disposable. I wish there’d been more time spent fleshing out the supporting villains, because Jon Voight just feels like “generic bureaucratic bad guy” and never really makes an impact.

What did surprise me is how freakishly modern a lot of the conversation around privacy feels. Some of the lines about giving up civil liberties for safety would fit perfectly in a script from this decade. The emotional stakes work when it’s about Smith’s family, but once the plot gets twistier in the third act, it starts to feel a bit cartoonish and less grounded.

Overall, it’s not subtle, but it’s still genuinely entertaining. If you want a smart popcorn thriller with some eerily predictive moments and two leads firing on all cylinders, Enemy of the State still holds up pretty well, even if some of its tech is laughably retro.