Enemy of the State (1998)

A lawyer becomes targeted by a corrupt politician and his N.S.A. goons when he accidentally receives key evidence to a politically motivated crime.

Director:

Tony Scott

Writer:

David Marconi

Stars:

Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight

5 wins & 16 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Will Smith	...	Robert Clayton Dean
Gene Hackman	...	Edward Lyle
Jon Voight	...	Thomas Brian Reynolds
Lisa Bonet	...	Rachel F. Banks
Regina King	...	Carla Dean
Stuart Wilson	...	Congressman Sam Albert
Laura Cayouette	...	Christa Hawkins
Loren Dean	...	Hicks
Barry Pepper	...	David Pratt
Ian Hart	...	Bingham
Jake Busey	...	Krug
Scott Caan	...	Jones
Jason Lee	...	Daniel Zavitz
Gabriel Byrne	...	Brill
James Le Gros	...	Jerry Miller

Storyline

Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) is a mild-mannered lawyer who works in Washington, D.C. He is on the trail of a kingpin named Paulie Pintero (Tom Sizemore). Meanwhile, a politician named Thomas Brian Reynolds (Jon Voight) is negotiating with Representative Phillip Hammersley (Jason Robards, Jr.) about a new surveillance system with satellites. But, Hammersley declines; Reynolds has Hammersley killed, but the murder is caught on tape, and the taper is chased by Reynolds' team of N.S.A. Agents. The guy must ditch the tape, so he plants it on Dean (unbeknownst to Dean). Then, the N.S.A. decides to get into Dean's life. That is when Dean's life began to fall apart all around him, with his wife and job both gone. Dean wants to find out what is going on. Then, he meets a man named "Brill" (Gene Hackman), who tells him that Dean has something that the government wants. Dean and Brill formulate a plan to get Dean's life back and turn the tables on Reynolds.

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Plot Keywords:

on the run | conspiracy | nsa | surveillance | national security agency | 

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Taglines:

Es ist kein Verfolgungswahn - Sie sind wirklich hinter dir her (It's no persecution complex - They're really after you.)

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Genres:

Action | Thriller

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for language and violence

Did You Know?

Trivia

When Robert Clayton Dean sees the article in the paper indicating that he's being investigated by the F.B.I., he says "They have no Sullivan protection for this." He's referring to the Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, which set the standard for defamation cases brought against media companies.

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Goofs

At the beginning of the scene where Dean meets and talks to his wife in the garage, the caption reads "Dean Residence 0715 hrs" but right after, the video surveillance feed from the kitchen is time stamped 12:43 - while it's possible that the video feeds simply count hours, minutes and seconds, unrelated to actual time, there is no practical reason for this, and recalculating time stamps on footage recorded from the feeds to actual time would be an unnecessary complication.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Congressman Phillip Hammersley: Come on. Come on, mutt. Now, look at that ball. All right. Come on, get that ball. Ah!

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Crazy Credits

The CNN journalist is a fictitious character.

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Alternate Versions

In the "Unrated Extended Version", the rogue NSA agents are shown hacking into Dean's office computer.

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Connections

Referenced in Smart Guy: It Takes Two (1999)

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Soundtracks

Good King Wenceslas
Written by John M. Neale (uncredited) and Thomas Helmore (uncredited)
Arranged by Dick Walter
Courtesy of APM

User Reviews

I like this one, also beeing somewhat realistic (not in every detail of course).

Well, I like this one. I like the cast, the visuals are well done, but what is more important is the plot that I like really much. It's not the most sophisticated plot of all times, but I think it's quite good, and to some degree, realistic. Of course it's not possible to move sattelites that quickly, or zoom in on a videotape that much and still have crystal-clear visual, but quite some technology seen is realistic today, or in the near future. This is an hollywood flick, all right, so they have quite much action and everything looks very easy, steering a sattelite seems to be no harder than playing a video game, what makes it all seem a bit unrealistic/sci-fi-like, but today's technical posibilities are quite large, and continue to grow, so informing oneself about the issue (I mean the real world issue) is not a bad idea.

To give you some points to think:

• It's routine for the credid card companies to document every transaction made with the cards, go figure who gets the docs if police is investigating.

• Every call / fax done is documented for billing, go figure, who...

• At least for your ISP it's possible to read every unencrypted email you send or receive, go figure ...

• Today there are MANY cameras in public areas in Great Britain, with numbers still growing.

• Face recognition software is already being used in combination with some surveillance cameras.

• Dictation software that can interpret your spoken word and convert it into written text is being sold to you today, maybe some organisations have much better versions at their hands ...

The list could go on, but what I want to say is that one should think about the posibilities and listen to what the politicians say, and what they want to allow the federal organisations.

You want to be able to still _enjoy_ the movie in some years time, not thinking of it as being somewhat normal just as everyday life, all right?

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

20 November 1998 (USA)

Also Known As:

Enemy of the State

Filming Locations:

4809 Boston St, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$90,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$20,038,573, 22 November 1998

Gross USA:

$111,549,836

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$250,849,789

Company Credits

Production Co:

Touchstone Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films

Technical Specs

Runtime:

132 min 140 min (extended)

Sound Mix:

DTS Dolby Digital SDDS

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.39 : 1