Sneakers (Collector's Edition)

Buy This Item Sneakers (Collector's Edition) by Universal Studios  Available from Amazon  $7.99  on 8-8-2008     This enjoyable thriller, written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson (the screenwriter of <i>Field of Dreams</i>), follows a raggedy group of corporate security experts who get in over their heads when they accept an assignment poaching some hot hardware for the National Security Agency. Robert Redford plays the group's guru, an aging techno-anarchist who has been hiding from the feds since the early 1970s; his companionable gang of freaks includes Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, Mary McDonnell, the late River Phoenix, and Sidney Poitier, as a veteran CIA operative turned "sneaker." The technological black box that everybody is after, an array of computer chips that can decode any encrypted message, isn't a very plausible invention, but it's a serviceable McGuffin, and the megalomania of the master plotter played by Ben Kingsley has more resonance than most. Modest inferences can be drawn about the very latest high-tech threats to civil liberties. <i>--David Chute</i> Reader Reviews you get to the end and they make it into a kind of joke. This is unfortunate: you get a very scary plot, of this chip that is so valuable in what it can do that holders of it are automatically offed, but then they decide to, well, you have to see it to lose your faith in the film's plausible impossibility. (OK, I don't want to be the spolier, but criticism is due). Before that silly ending, the suspence is wonderful and believable. Redford is totally convncing, as is his old friend (Kingsley), who went to prison insead of him by chance. They have this wonderful duality that you find n fiction, good and bad from experience and luck of the draw, and are now deadly enemies. You get these wonderfully unorthodox solutions, such as the blind man helping Redford to find where he had been taken by the sound he remembers while blindfolded in a car trunk. There are many touches like that, splendid details. Then there is the caper, which is complex and frightening, with bad guys you could believe you would want to avoid. It is great - 5 stars - right up until the ridicoulous finale, which ruins the whole thng. Recommended, but skip the last 2 minutes.

Sneakers (Collector's Edition) Available from Amazon Price: $7.99 Updated on 8-8-2008.

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