Enemy of the State

While watching Tony Scott's Enemy of the State, I started having flashbacks to other Tony Scott films I've endured--The Last Boy Scout, The Fan, etc. The opposite of an auteur, Scott never transcends his material. Instead, he applies the same old beer-ad technique he's been getting by on for years. True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino, was an exception. Enemy of the State, written by one David Marconi, isn't. At once derivative and anonymous, this quote-unquote action-thriller features Will Smith as a labor lawyer who's subjected to an electronic smear campaign by the National Security Agency, a real-life governmental organization that makes the CIA look like the Mickey Mouse Club. Anyway, they invalidate his charge cards, then try to kill him, which, if you buy the movie's premise, is the same thing. Working without a partner this time, Smith tries to stay light on his feet, but he's bogged down by a script that owes too much to the paranoid thrillers of the '70s (Three Days of the Condor, The Conversation), and by Scott's bombastically hollow direction.