Enemy of the State

Tony Scott’s film follows Robert Clayton Dean, a labor lawyer targeted by the security apparatus after a murder recording reaches him without his knowing. His life is taken apart on paper before any chase begins: credit, job, marriage. Brill, played by Gene Hackman, is built on the surveillance man he played for Francis Ford Coppola in 1974. The photograph in his agency file is a frame from that film, the translucent raincoat is the same kind, the caged warehouse workshop almost identical. The production settled in Baltimore, where the old Dr Pepper plant was actually demolished for the film and part of the chase was shot at the Consolidated Coal yards by the Patapsco River. It reached cinemas about three years before September 11 and the surveillance laws that followed. In a CNN interview aired in March 2001, NSA director Michael Hayden said he had judged the agency could not survive with its public impression formed by the last Will Smith movie, and he let journalists inside. A good fit if you want the threat bureaucratic first and physical only later, and if you like counting the nods to Hackman’s older role. Not for you if you want the satellite and eavesdropping powers on screen to respect real limits; the agency itself moved to correct the impression the film left.