ENEMY OF THE STATE – Thriller Thursday

One of the perennial thrillers of the 90’s, Enemy of the State helped define a new style of action filmmaking. Starring Will Smith, the movie also worked, despite intense Hollywood production and kinetic editing, because it obeyed many of the same structural rules that had helped define the paranoid thriller genre in the forty years before. The film also deserves mention, simply because it was directed by the late Tony Scott, one of the stylistic forbearers of action movies for a quarter of a century. Gene Hackman and Jon Voight round out the cast.

Will Smith in Enemy of the State

First and foremost, an excellent setup is required in such films and this one is no different. Enemy of the State’s setup has a few moving parts, but they come together in a relatively organic manner to fling an innocent and untrained man out on the run from a much larger and powerful, connected enemy. Remind you of anything?

The setup relies on a nature photographer, Zavits, played by Jason Lee, who has set up a camera behind a blind to automatically take photographs of fowl. This nature camera accidentally, and at first surreptitiously, captures the assassination of a U.S. Congressman by members of the NSA. It is just after the nature photographer finds the pictures on his camera’s digital memory card that he realizes a component of the government is after him. They will do anything to get the file. He deposits the images in the pants pocket of his old college-now-lawyer buddy, Robert Dean (You can bet that would be a better name if the script were written nowadays) played by Will Smith. Then Zavits is murdered.

The men who are watching Robert Dean believe that Will’s character knows exactly what he’s been handed—which isn’t true. But the springboard is complete.

I love this setup for two specific reasons:

First of all, let’s talk about verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is one of the most important elements of a good thriller, which is to say, an accurate depiction of reality. Now it might not completely hold up today, but the assassination in the beginning of Enemy of the State is thrilling due to the precision in which it is carried out. The congressman is injected with a knockout agent of some sort, his body placed in his car with heart pills scattered, and his car deposited into a nearby body of water. It’s the type of enthrallingly dark sequence which doesn’t seem so far off from what an elite organization might attempt—the realism making it incredibly exciting.

The NSA takes out a U.S. Congressman

Second, the manner in which Will Smith is propelled into the story is classic. A great paranoid thriller always involves a great conspiracy. And a normal man, an everyman, whose specialty (law) is not central to the world that he’s thrust into (covert action), is caught up in the web of the conspiracy. The man doesn’t know that he is a problem, that he’s trespassed across an invisible line, and that deep and heavy powers are now aligned against him. But the irony is that those powers are more afraid of the man than he is of them. At first. Eventually the man will become the prey, until the final turn in which the man is actually the gum in the works that will take the entire conspiracy down. Enemy of the State fulfills all of these moments perfectly—one after the other.

But there is a more important reason to watch this movie, excluding the awesome pyrotechnics, filming and editing style of Tony Scott—which is exceptional.

The theme of Enemy of the State was way ahead of its time. It’s very simple:

The NSA is always watching.

Here’s the thing. In a not-subtle nod to past paranoid thrillers, Gene Hackman plays an iteration of himself from The Conversastion. And he’s the one who exposes the general theme of the movie to Will Smith.

Check out the video below, starting around minute one, where Hackman shows Will that he’s being tracked from his pen to his shoes:

The idea that Hackman espouses to Will Smith, while on the run, is that the NSA has the ability to capture almost all electronic communication. How very Edward Snowden of him—twenty years beforehand. What’s funny is that while in the late 90s, some of the techniques that the NSA used to track Will Smith may have seemed contrived, they don’t feel that way any longer. Now we really do know that those filled-up parking lots and buildings in the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland are filled with men and women spending every minute of their working day figuring out how to hack their way through every electronic device known to man. This stuff is real, and while Enemy of the State may have been slightly criticized for its “the eye in the sky is always watching” lesson, history has proven it to be correct.

NSA Headquarters in Fort Meade, Virginia

I also appreciate this film because it directly aimed itself at the NSA, instead of playing the government angle like Marathon Man does, with a nebulous “organization” involved. No. There is nothing nebulous here, it’s all laid out in the open, and they even use stock footage of the NSA to show us the exact location from which the nefarious conspiracy is being directed.

Now, of course, there is plenty of Hollywood-style manipulation involved. The real NSA is likely a more buttoned up place. And it’s unlikely that they’re spending their time trying to assassinate members of congress. But hey—for conspiracy buffs—its not always about “what is,” as much as it’s about “what if…”

Enemy of the State has plenty of “what if’s” to hang a hat on, making it eminently watchable even many years later.

Past THRILLER THURSDAY posts here:

WAGES OF FEAR

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR

SICARIO

MARATHON MAN

And if you are interested in checking out the film: