“You’re either very smart,” one character says to another not once but twice in Enemy of the State, “or incredibly stupid.” That’s how I feel about the film. It seems like a smart movie, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t. The Tony Scott-directed surveillance thriller is often credited with predicting the PATRIOT Act and the entire post-9/11 surveillance state, but it doesn’t predict anything particular about that issue besides its outsized existence in American political culture. It’s just a classic “wrong man” thriller in which advanced surveillance technologies are used by rogue government agents to cover their tracks. In real life, the controversy over surveillance is about the government preemptively targeting wide swaths of innocent people, not tracking and murdering potential whistleblowers in broad daylight (we don’t think). It’s a popcorn movie in the guise of an intelligent thriller for grownups. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either very smart or incredibly stupid.
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