The Thomas Crown Affair

Pierce Brosnan plays a suave financier who pulls off an elegant heist: he stole four hours of my precious time. I tried to watch this movie three times but fell asleep three nights in a row. The plot was as flimsy as the material on Renee Russo's party dress, as awkward and unrealistic as Brosnan's golf swing.

I like crime caper movies generally and usually root for the criminals to get away with it. Elmore Leonard is particular good at the crime caper, creating heroes who are tough and cool with snappy things to say. This script could have used an Elmore Leonard. Real life crime is seldom as glamorous as the movies. In real life a prostitute is a sixteen-year-old runaway savagely beaten and brutalized, victimized by a depraved NFL Hall of Famer who's run out of second chances. In a movie a hooker has a heart of gold and perfect makeup and a five thousand dollar dress.

Crime movies are escapist fare, a break from the decayed realities of our fallen world. In movies greedy corporations don't set the oceans on fire. A clever con men rips off a few million in gold, bricks of currency, or jewels, and if he has a clipped British accent and a perfect head of hair, he probably gets the girl in the end.

But this one didn't work for me. I tried but couldn't stay awake. There were holes in the plot that distracted from the elegant and expensive scenery. Why would the notoriously territorial NYPD allow a glammed-up insurance bounty hunter free reign of the precinct and the evidence? Wouldn't the sprinklers that washed away the disguise at the end of the movie have caused several million dollars of damage to a room full of priceless and irreplaceable artwork? How could five men in bowler hats confuse an entire SWAT team and twenty surveillance cameras? Would't the cops just shoot them all? Just asking.

The whole thing just felt too pat and familiar to me. The glider scene was supposed to be glamorous and seductive but it just felt cramped and fake. Renee Russo's not suited for heavy drama; she does better as the girlfriend in ironic comedies where she can half-smile and be bemused by the men acting like boys. In serious roles she just seems to be trying too much, and you never lose the feeling she's an actress trying to act. Even the sets were distracting. I felt I had seen Pierce Brosnan here before, all dapper and British, and any moment one of Dr. No's henchmen were going to emerge from around the corner with a gleaming Luger with a huge silencer, or Meryl Streep would burst forth from the flowering ivy at the Caribbean villa with a song from Mama Mia. I couldn't experience this movie as a story. It was indistinguishable. The love scenes fell flat. Brosnan and Russo writhing on tables and staircases just felt like two mannequins posed with their legs twisted around each other, or a child posing two dolls in a disturbing way. I didn't believe them for a second. A Latin dance number was supposed to convey risk and sensuality and danger, but I couldn't get my mind off that dress, as thin as a sausage casing and about that erotic.

Usually it's fascinating to get a glimpse of the lives of the superrich, to see how much freedom and opportunity and pure joy a lot of money can promise, but this felt too remote and fantastical, Brosnan sliding under two thousand-pound security gates without anyone noticing, not even getting any dust on the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit. His Croatian crooks didn't sing despite the threat of thirty years, and a forgery tossed together overnight fooled the experts at the Museum. It just seems like the good guys would be a little more careful and harder to dupe, that the someone would put two and two together before the crook could count to ten. Brosnan had everything. Why would his character risk destroying an empire over a picture he could buy a hundred times over?

The real life titans of mergers and acquistions are pretty faceless and uninteresting men with an army of bright lawyers that oversee their every move. Their empires are carefully shielded. For every Donald Trump, flamboyant and self-glorifying and so hungry for attention he engages in public feuds with lightweights like Rosie O'Donnell, there is a Warren Buffet, who lives in the same five-bedroom stucco house he bought Omaha 53 years ago. Four years ago he announced plans to give 85% of his fortune to charity, donating $10 million to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and $50 million dollars to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He went to public schools. He started his empire with paper routes and putting pinball machines in barbershops.

Make a good movie about his life and rise to success, and that could be pretty entertaining stuff. But please, no predictable writhing on the staircase. I like the kissing parts as much as anyone, but they are only interesting if the characters have convinced me they have a reason to like one another. Two bony-shouldered clothes racks wrestling their way out of expensive silk just doesn't do the trick all by itself.