Entrapment (1999) * * *

Directed by:  Jon Amiel

Starring:  Catherine Zeta-Jones, Sean Connery, Will Patton, Ving Rhames, Maury Chaykin

Entrapment is a caper movie containing twists, turns, swerves, double-crosses, and people hanging from very, very high places.     It's a whole lot of fun with appealing stars who play appealing characters even though they are thieves.  

The movie opens with a masked thief scaling down a New York highrise and stealing a Rembrandt painting.     Thinking back to 1976's Silver Streak, where all of the fuss was over letters that may or may not have been written by Rembrandt, a lot of bad things have been done in the late painter's name.    Who committed the robbery?    An insurance agent named Virginia Baker (Zeta-Jones) thinks it's the work of Robert "Mac" Macdougal (Connery), a master thief who remains at-large after pulling off several high profile robberies of priceless art work.  

She tracks the elusive Mac to London and plans to go undercover posing as an aspiring thief who wants to enlist Mac's help.    Because she looks like Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mac agrees to help her.    Had Virginia Baker looked like the landlord that Roy Munson had to bang in Kingpin in order to keep his apartment, I doubt Mac would've been so quick to help out.     If you don't know what I mean, see Kingpin and then finish reading this review.

Mac and Virginia plan a big heist in London and an even bigger one in Kuala Lampur on New Year's Eve 1999.    Mac's shadowy assistant Thibodeaux (Rhames) shows up and his role remains murky until the end when all of the players' roles become known.     The film was made and released with the looming Y2K scare hovering over the New Year's Eve celebrations.      Virginia and Mac plan to use the scare to their advantage as they look to steal $8 billion from the world's largest clearance bank (via computer of course).    This causes Mac to lament that stealing money isn't what it used to be.   "Where is the loot?" he says as they break into the vaunted computer room to wire transfer the money into their account.      Moving $8 billion in cash is certainly more of a burden than pressing a few buttons.  

On Mac and Virginia's tail is Hector Cruz (Patton), her boss at the insurance agency whose motives for following her may not be professionally motivated.       Part of the suspense comes from trying to figure where Virginia is coming from.    Is she really trying to get Mac arrested?    Is she falling for the old guy?   We can't separate the truth from the lies, or is it the other way around?    And what about Mac?    Does he really believe that she's a novice thief looking for a big score?     His big head may say no, but the little head may have other ideas, especially after seeing Virginia slink through a maze of lasers in a most suggestive fashion.

Entrapment is goofy and sometimes preposterous.    We see a lot of well-done stunts and plenty of narrow escapes by Mac and Virginia.     The whole movie is light caper stuff, but it gets the job done.   Connery and Zeta-Jones make a good team and generate some heat, even though there is roughly a 40-year age difference between them.      I still can't figure out the "Bus/Train Swipe Effect" (as I call it).     It goes like this.    Two people are standing across the railroad tracks from each other.     A train whizzes by and suddenly one of the characters is gone.     This happens like three times in the final ten minutes.      How does the person disappear so fast?     Does he vanish into some other dimension for a moment?   This really has no impact on my enjoyment of Entrapment, but I just want to know.