Chaste good friends

Entrapment (12)

THOSE aghast that Catherine Zeta-Jones has been 'romping' with jowly fiftysomething Michael Douglas need to understand the context. Douglas is a veritable spring chicken next to CZJ's latest on-screen squeeze: Sean Connery, object of her romantic attention in Entrapment, is 68. Mercifully, the movie is romp-free, although its limited appeal rests entirely on its Celtic stars' chaste chemistry. That apart, Jon Amiel's film is a daft tale of thievery which seeks not only to suspend our disbelief but to make off with it in a bag marked 'swag' and leave a box of Milk Tray at the scene of the crime.

Connery plays the greatest cat burglar in the world. No, he does, really. Zeta-Jones as FBI investigator Gin reckons he's perpetrator of the movie's opening sequence, the lifting of a Rembrandt from a New York skyscraper. At least that's what she tells her boss, who gives her time off to hunt 'Mac' down. But Connery's veteran outlaw brings out the devil in Miss Jones. For she's a nifty burglar herself, and the two are soon in cagey cahoots. It will gratify UK egos to note that it takes an American, Gin, to lead noble art-thief Mac truly astray, inviting him to rob a bank - the world's biggest - instead. First, Entrapment transports us to Scotland, where Mac keeps a castle. Here unfolds one of cinedom's oddest ever erotic sequences, as Connery, in his role as the Yoda of cat-burglary, instructs his lithe young charge in the art of dodging infra-red security beams. In meticulously studied stages, the feline Zeta-Jones extends her exquisite proportions balletically across a grid of intertwined wool. The camera caresses her limbs, her haunches; it swoons at the strain of her sinews and the quiver of her lips; it seems to steam up as she gasps. We see Connery beyond her flaying legs, absorbing her manfully. A piano tinkles. This isn't crime as anyone outside Hollywood has experienced it. It's sex, as superannuated film stars allow themselves to experience it. Entrapment makes an issue of Connery's advancing years. "He's 60 years old; he's not Spiderman any more," according to Gin's chief Hector Cruz (Will Patton). Connery enjoys a joke or two at his own expense, allowing himself a weary puff at the camera when Mac leads Gin on a punishing jog. Of course, the heroine still fancies her mentor - he's the Sexiest Man Alive, after all. But in Entrapment, intriguingly, Mac doesn't respond: he physically repels Zeta-Jones' lusty attentions, invoking as an excuse something shadowy from his past. This hint at a back-story is the film's most (only?) fascinating moment, allowing for the audacious possibility that Connery's character may - cover your ears, patriotic Scots - be gay. It's a far cry from Bond, but so is Connery now. In other ways, Amiel's film is indebted to the 007 canon. Any of its dramatically choreographed action sequences could kick-start a Bond flick; the concluding one, which sees Mac and Gin dangling from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur as the millennium chimes in, reminded me of North By Northwest's Mount Rushmore finale. The philosophy's the same: find the mightiest, most famous location, then clamber eye- catchingly all over it. It just galls that Entrapment bothers so little with what's sandwiched between the acrobatics. The script veers from the preposterous - the two thieves plan their biggest burglary ever in less than a day - to the bewilderingly convoluted. The characters' identities and loyalties are constantly up for grabs, which cheapens what we see, because we don't know whether it's worth believing. Connery retains the perpetual twinkle and Zeta-Jones as Gin is a tonic. But the film hasn't the care to be credible or the courage to be other than formulaic. When in its closing moments, Entrapment threatens, then refuses, to end on a devastating shot of a disappointed Connery, looking old, looking lost, we feel fleetingly how much better this merely diverting popcorn movie might have been. Brian Logan

Copyright 1999
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