It’s a good time to revisit ‘Enemy of the State’

When it was announced that Gene Hackman — one of the greatest American actors the big screen has ever seen — passed away last month, movie lovers sprinted to their watchlists to find films of his to dig into. Boxers get ten-bell salutes. Actors get a sea of their greatest works logged on Letterboxd. Many folks seemed to go for “The Conversation,” Hackman’s 1974 paranoid thriller, or “The Royal Tenenbaums” from 2001, his last truly great role. But a few years before this, in 1998, he teamed up with Will Smith in Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State,” the kind of critically and commercially successful blockbuster Hollywood seldom makes anymore.

At the time of its release, though well received, the film was considered more low culture than the 1974 film it homages. But with the passage of time, the wholesale degradation of the industry, and our minds cursed by the knowledge of present-day politics, “Enemy of the State” feels both prescient and comforting. It’s more than a little bit scary how ahead of its time the film was.

The film’s central plot surrounds a new piece of legislation that would grant the NSA the ability to trample on civil liberties under the guise of preventing terrorism. Jason Robards, in a small role as a congressman, rejects the false binary the bill calls for: that citizens must sacrifice their privacy in order to ensure their safety. For his troubles and refusal to support this cause, he is murdered by goons at the behest of Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight), an NSA assistant director who cares more about how forcing this bill into law will advance his career than how it might affect the national landscape.

Bird watcher Daniel Zavitz (Jason Lee) throws a wrench into their scheme when he accidentally captures footage of the killing on camera. Reynolds tasks an operation of his upper-tier goons (Barry Pepper and Loren Dean), doofus ex-military types (Jake Busey and Scott Caan), and a small army of tech nerds (Jack Black, Seth Green, and Jamie Kennedy) to hunt this man down and retrieve the evidence. But when Zavitz surreptitiously passes the tape off to a former college friend, this entire apparatus transfers onto him instead. This is where Will Smith comes in as Robert Dean, a labor lawyer in Washington, D.C., who becomes wrapped up in an elaborate web of surveillance, misinformation and blackmail, all in the pursuit of crucial intel that he doesn’t even know he has. 

The film is structured like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s “wrong man” thrillers on steroids. Hitch’s arch pacing and shrewd compositions are replaced by director Tony Scott’s frenetic and chaotic staging, capturing the visual identity of the millennium’s end with accuracy and verve. (It also makes the most of its location, shooting between D.C. and Baltimore to capture the district and its surrounding eras better than most political thrillers.) Few action films can pull off storylines this nuanced and fast-paced without devolving into a sludgy hodgepodge of plot holes and questionable character decisions. But writer David Marconi’s script benefits from key punch ups from “Andor” showrunner Tony Gilroy and “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, providing better storytelling and dialogue than many similar Jerry Bruckheimer productions of the era.

Smith is exemplary as a charming, easy-to-root-for protagonist. He goes to bed one night not caring about the surveillance bill when his wife Carla (Regina King) rails against it on the news, only to wake up in a unique nightmare that doubles as a cartoon hypothetical about why she was right in the first place. When Carla asks if he wants the government listening in on his phone calls, Dean responds “I’m not planning on blowing up the country.” “But how do we know,’ she says, “Until we’ve aired out your dirty little secrets?” In quick succession, everything from his antagonism towards the mob in his day job to an affair he had with his college ex Rachel (Lisa Bonet) comes back to bite him. 

Through every meticulous detail, the film doubles as an exploded diagram of how little privacy the viewer really has. Scott constantly intersperses his footage of the scenes themselves with angles from security cameras, bird’s eye satellite footage of the city’s grid, and kaleidoscopic images from inside various computers and systems. There’s a scene where the techies are watching Dean and making remarks about his expensive belongings, sounding like snarky pocket watchers or just nerds marveling at his wealth and swag. But later, it’s revealed they were carefully cataloging items to be replaced by doppelgangers with surveillance equipment hidden inside, from his shoes to his watch and his pen. 

It’s even crazier to watch this film in 2025 and realize how prophetic the (then fictional and exaggerated) proceedings really were. Everything outlined in this made-up legislation was codified in The Patriot Act three years after its release in the wake of 9/11, which, completely by coincidence, appears to be the villain’s birthdate when we see an image of his ID. This was a fun, summer-style blockbuster released in the fall, and it casually depicts a level of unsettling overreach from the “deep state” that 1: we would soon come to know as the reality of modern life, and 2: would eventually beget its own ouroboros of new, pervasive conspiracies as well. But there’s one thing that makes it all go down a lot smoother, and that’s Hackman’s presence.

The film doesn’t fully come to life until the midway mark when Dean has to team up with “Brill” (Hackman), a former intelligence spook he occasionally contracts for surveillance work through Rachel. One of the quiet tragedies of modern Hollywood and the death of the traditional movie star is that audiences no longer get to see vaunted veterans mix it up on screen with their younger, newer counterparts. But there is so much power in the chemistry between Smith and Hackman. Perhaps the “training” he got from going toe to toe with Tommy Lee Jones the previous year for “Men in Black” teed him up for this, but every moment they spend on screen disparaging one another before begrudgingly developing a sense of kinship and mutual respect is a delight. 

On the page, watching the everyman — abused by this panopticon of callous spooks — turn the tables on his opps and get revenge on them using their own methods is a treat on its own. It’s even more fun to watch Smith in his absolute prime and Hackman, playing an implied echo of his character from “The Conversation” (they use an image from that film when showing an old ID for his character here), executing guerilla tactics on all the evil suits we’ve seen insist that privacy deserves to be a thing of the past. 

They still make movies that try to hold up a mirror to America’s jagged visage, but seldom do they remember to include the requisite escapism to allow for a truly cathartic break from the awful truth. Hackman and Smith’s enviable buddy energy is a spoonful of sugar to help the harsh themes go down smoothly.

“Enemy of the State” is currently streaming on Prime Video

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