Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
When the videotape of the murder of a congressman unknowingly ends up in the hands of labor lawyer and dedicated family man Robert Clayton Dean, he is framed for the murder. With the help of the mysterious Brill, Dean attempts to throw the NSA off his trail and prove his innocence.
Enemy of the State is a competent, entertaining late-90s surveillance thriller that rides the wave of pre-9/11 anxiety about government overreach. The plot is well-paced and cleverly constructed, with the NSA's omnipresent tracking keeping tension high throughout. Will Smith and Gene Hackman deliver solid performances — Hackman in particular brings gravitas and echoes of his earlier The Conversation role, adding meta-textual depth. The cinematography by Daniel Mindel is kinetic and energetic, using split-screens and surveillance-camera aesthetics effectively for the era, though it doesn't rise to truly distinctive visual territory. The film's surveillance-state paranoia was genuinely prescient but the execution follows a fairly conventional chase-thriller template, limiting its novelty. The ending resolves things in a somewhat convenient and crowd-pleasing fashion, leaning on mob-versus-NSA confrontation that feels a bit contrived and deflates the tension the film had carefully built.