Enemy of the State is a 1998 spy-thriller film directed by Tony Scott about a group of rogue NSA
agents who kill a Congressman in a politically-motivated murder, and
then try to cover up the murder by destroying evidence and intimidating
witnesses. It was written by David Marconi and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. The film stars Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, Lisa Bonet and Regina King. It grossed over US$250,000,000 worldwide ($111,549,836 domestically).
The film seems to have been strongly influenced by Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic, The Conversation. Enemy of the State appears to borrow the character of surveillance expert Brill, and his electronically-shielded home/workplace from The Conversation. However, the Brill character has different names in each movie, and it was probably not intended for Enemy of the State to be a sequel as such. See the analysis under the heading Influences below.
As the U.S. senator moves to pass new legislation that dramatically expands the surveillance powers of law enforcement agencies, Congressman Phil Hammersley (Jason Robards, uncredited) remains firmly opposed to its passage. A National Security Agency official, Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight),
realizes the only way to assure its passage is to kill Hammersley. Rep.
Hammersley is quietly killed in a remote park by Reynolds' team, but
they are unaware that a video camera set up in a duck blind by wildlife researcher Daniel Zavitz (Jason Lee)
has captured the entire incident. Zavitz discovers the murder, and
alerts an anti-war friend and underground journalist while preparing the
video on computer cartridge. Reynolds learns of Zavitz's footage, and
sends a team from the National Security Agency
to recover the video by any means necessary. On the run, Zavitz
silently passes the computer cartridge to his old college friend, labor
lawyer Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), and soon dies in a traffic accident.
When the NSA discover that Dean may have the video, they raid his
house and plant surveillance devices. Without evidence of the video, the
NSA further proceeds to create a false scandal that Dean has a love
affair with Rachel Banks (Lisa Bonet),
a former girlfriend. This leads to Dean being dismissed from his job,
his bank accounts frozen, and his wife throwing him out the house. Dean,
trailed by the NSA, meets with Banks, and Banks offers to set up a
meeting with "Brill", an information contact of hers. On meeting Brill (Gabriel Byrne), he discovers the man is a decoy to throw the NSA off his trail while the real Brill, retired NSA agent Edward Lyle (Gene Hackman)
sneaks them away and helps to rid Dean of all the tracking devices on
his body. While they hide, the NSA frame Dean for the murder of Banks.
While Lyle is able to find evidence that the NSA executed the murder, it
is destroyed during a frantic escape from an NSA raid.
Dean and Lyle blackmail another supporter of the surveillance bill, Congressman Sam Albert (Stuart Wilson),
and record various state secrets to lure Reynolds into agreeing to a
meeting with Brill to reveal his involvement. Dean and Lyle are captured
by Reynolds and the NSA before the meeting. Dean quickly invents the
subterfuge that the Hammersley murder footage is in the hands of the
Pintero mafia family, an organization he had to deal with before this incident and aware their headquarters are under FBI surveillance. When Dean and Lyle meet the Pinteros, Renyolds and the NSA team intervene, leading to a Mexican standoff
and eventually a full-fledged gunfight which the FBI quickly put an end
to, but not after Reynolds and several of his NSA team are killed. Dean
and Lyle escape, with Lyle quickly disappearing from the authorities.
The FBI discovers the plot behind the legislation, causing it to fail to
gain passage, though they cover up the NSA's involvement. Dean is
cleared of all charges and is reunited with his wife. Lyle escapes to exile in a tropical location, but sends a friendly 'goodbye' message to Dean via his rigged television set.
Although set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, most of the filming was done in Baltimore.
Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise were considered for the part that went to Will Smith,
who took the role largely because he wanted to work with Gene Hackman
and had previously enjoyed working with producer Jerry Bruckheimer on Bad Boys. George Clooney
was also considered for a role in the film. Sean Connery was considered
for the role that went to Hackman. The film's crew included a technical surveillance counter-measures consultant who also had a minor role as a spy shop merchant.
It has been suggested that this film could be considered as a sequel to the 1974 classic, The Conversation.
However, the only real connection is that actor Gene Hackman plays an
almost identical role in each movie. His character has a different name
in each film: Harry Caul in The Conversation, but Edward Lyle (codename Brill) in Enemy of the State. While Enemy of the State borrows the character of Brill, and his electronically-shielded home/workplace from The Conversation, it was probably not intended to be a sequel as such.
Some scenes in the movie have a strong connection to The Conversation.
A government team operates the audio surveillance in the plaza where
Smith's and Bonet's characters will meet. This closely parallels the
surveillance setup which is used in the opening scene of The Conversation
in Union Square, San Francisco. Later, Brill (Hackman) takes Dean
(Smith) to his own home base which is completely shielded, like a huge
Faraday Cage. This would appear to be modelled after Harry Caul's
workplace in the earlier film. A further similarity is that Hackman
destroys his home in both movies: In The Conversation Harry Caul tears his apartment apart piece-by-piece looking for an elusive surveillance device; in Enemy of the State Brill blows up his home/workplace building to eliminate his tracks.
Plot-wise, Enemy of the State probably also owes a debt to Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest. Like the Cary Grant
character, Smith's Dean is a lone man pursued by shadowy government
agents. The surveillance video dropped into Dean's shopping bag would
correspond to a Hitchcock "MacGuffin" - a key object which drives the
plot forward.
Enemy of the State was generally well-received by professional critics. Rotten Tomatoes
presented a 70% "Fresh" rating for the movie, with fifty-seven critics
approving of the movie and twenty-four noting the film as "Rotten;"[3] similar results could be found at the website Metacritic, which displayed a normalized ranking of sixty-seven out of one hundred on the basis of the views of twenty-two critics.[4]Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times
expressed enjoyment in the movie, noting how the movie's "pizazz
[overcame] occasional lapses in moment-to-moment plausibility;"[5]Janet Maslin of the New York Times
approved of the film's action-packed sequences, but cited how it was
similar in manner to the rest of the members of "Simpson['s and]
Bruckheimer['s] school of empty but sensation-packed filming."[6] In a combination of the two's views, Edvins Beitiks of the San Francisco Examiner
both praised many of the movies' development aspects, and criticized
how the concept that drove the movie from the beginning, the efficiency
of government intelligence, lacked realism.[7]
The film opened at #2, behind The Rugrats Movie, grossing $20,038,573 over its first weekend in 2,393 theaters and averaging about $8,374 per venue.[8][9]
The PBS Nova episode "Spy Factory" reports that the Hollywood
capabilities of the National Security Agency are fiction: although the
agency can intercept transmissions, connecting the dots is difficult.[10]
^ Nova, "Spy Factory". WBGH Boston, Public Broadcasting Service. You can watch the video or read the transcript on the http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/ Web site.
