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| Movies,
Justin Harries,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F3
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In the welter of remakes flung out by the studios in an attempt to have a hit (usually like slinging shit at a wall), a recreation of the Thomas Crown Affair seems to ring right. In an age when celluloid relationships thrive on caution and sexual repression, a movie where the love scene is a game of chess is ripe for regurgitation. Add to this our current preoccupation with anything ‘swinging’, the only opportunity missing is an attempt to bring back the sadly forsaken split screen process.
This version swaps the original bank heist for an art theft (the iconic chess match is also wisely deleted, I rather hoped this would be updated with a game of Tekken), purposely exposing the frippery that lies at the heart of the tale.
Light but certainly elegant, the film slides by on an ample trail of gloss, encapsulated by Brosnan’s smarmy Euro cheese. I never fully bought into the character, or rarely felt the inner emptiness that drives him to crime, but the current Bond’s impenetrable veneer fits Crown snugly. Russo works harder at being at all believable and succeeds, briefly but effectively presenting us with the cracks that must lie beneath such a supremely self-assured person. For his part John McTiernan treats us to endless gliding vistas of New York; he certainly knows how to make the city look good. The movie reeks of quality, with just the right mix of snappy and stately; however, the glacial masks of the protagonists exude a little too much distrust of intimacy to draw us in. Superficial but pleasing finesses.
UK rating:
15
US rating:
PG
John McTiernan1999, US
Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary
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