In the A kind of … series, Nick Rogers takes a monthly look at films celebrating their 20th or 30th anniversary of initial release this year – seven from 1992 (the supplement in the June double-feature column) and six from 2002. The self-imposed rules of the column: No movie with an Oscar nomination and no movie among the top 10 box office hits of their year.
Consider the years 1992 Sneakers as Mission: Quite possible. This tale of a group of (mostly) middle-aged hackers in search of a holy grail of decryption devices is a pragmatically paranoid, perfectly paced techno-thriller. This also faces the difficulty of reconciling rage against the machine once it observes, analyzes and assimilates your method of rebellion. The monolith learns the rules. He dresses up with decorum. It gets bigger as the stones you throw at it get smaller. It feeds on the energy you send against it, and the world isn’t a safer place after all that either. It just means that official seals and signatures more deeply sanction the danger he poses.
Although hardly at the insidious level of, say, The parallax view, sneakers remains ideologically disturbing. And yet there remains a deft fantasy to the film, as well as a distinct humanity which supports it well beyond the expiration date of its displayed technology. With its themes of preserving purity of purpose amid the inevitable churning of progress, it may not be enough as hard as a 180 from director Phil Alden Robinson’s previous film, field of dreams, as it may seem. Robinson also co-wrote Sneakers (as well as Oscar nominee War games writers Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes) and boarded the project after casting Robert Redford — himself a generational icon of bending the Hollywood status quo just enough to productively evolve systems from within.
Sneakers opens in 1969, when a pair of intellectual and mischievous industrious students infiltrate banking systems to fund their progressive political causes. When pizza management duties fall to Martin Brice, he appears to be the unlucky one heading into the thick of the heist. But as the cops swarm, his buddy Cosmo is arrested and Martin heads north to Canada until the coast is clear.
More than 20 years later, Martin (Redford) lives on as Martin Bishop (a clever nod to a deeply carved Easter egg at Redford’s Three days of the Condor) and leads a security consulting team. They are conspiracy enthusiast and electronics technician Mother (Dan Aykroyd, essentially playing himself), blind telecommunications hacker and pivot of Team Whistler (David Strathairn), anxious next-gen genius Carl (the late River Phoenix) and Crease (the late Sidney Poitier), a family man who left the CIA behind. Crease lends crumbs of credibility to a group that would otherwise be a bickering team at the X files’ lone armed men; That said, their bickering often creates all the compounded chaos necessary to circumvent the systems they’re testing.
Martin runs a company where the employee list outnumbers the customer list — a reflection of his generosity in compensating misfits who have similar gifts (and troubled pasts)…and his survivor’s guilt for leaving Cosmo, who died in jail. Martin prefers shadows to sunlight and stays completely out of government jobs until two National Security Agency agents issue a threatening demand that Martin must respond to. They don’t interrogate Martin to retrieve a black box from a rock star scientist. They know Martin’s real name. He can therefore either make their offer and erase his file, or say no and serve the time he avoided.
With the help of his team—and sometimes his collaborator/former lover Liz (Mary McDonnell)—Martin acquires the box quite easily; as described by Redford, Martin is a master carver of bullshit at getting behind the right doors. The hardest part will be living through the ensuing conspiracy. NSA people are not what they seem. Martin is involved in a shocking murder. His team discovers that the box can decipher – and therefore destabilize – damn almost anything. And Cosmo turns out to be very much alive (and played by a well-trimmed ponytailed Ben Kingsley).
There is a confident, bubbly and often comedic cadence to Sneakers it only comes from enough space for the assembled expert instruments to warm up. Using narrative motifs and well-orchestrated moves, Robinson builds the film from the box depicting a celebration of all it makes possible to a fear of all it makes possible. Crease is also the conscience of the group, and Poitier lends his own irresistible gravity to temper everyone else’s jokes about the godlike powers they now possess. More than any of them, Crease knows the danger of tinkering too long and discovering too much.
Luckily, that doesn’t lead to endless circle-running, tail-chasing, and clip-dumping nonsense. In the first hour of Sneakersonly two shots ring out (and they’re also apt afterwards), but their reports reverberate throughout the film – amplifying a chilling escalation of the stakes and a keen realization from Martin of just how far Cosmo will go to perform the change with bullets rather than those of Martin’s relatively weak beliefs.
“Have you ever had time to do that, Marty?” Change the world ? Cosmo needles his frenemy. “No, I guess not,” Martin replies. It is here that Martin must recognize the monolith or at least recognize its growing obsolescence before him. It’s not a moral failing, just a function of humanity, mortality, and evolution that by definition leaves people and concepts behind, and there are also unexpected elements of compassion in Cosmo, baffling him even in times when he could assert a stronger advantage for his nefarious plans.
Sneakers is also expertly performed across the board, with funny comic character actor Stephen Tobolowsky later joining as a nebulous developer from whom the team must source a very (and fun) voice password. ) specific. And while the offices’ dry, beige exteriors initially look dull, they give way to sleek, dark interiors of ominous imagery – enough to make you wonder what kind of NDA/gain of function stuff might be happening to this look. otherwise harmless business park on the outskirts of your city.
Cosmo also poses another key question to Martin: “You don’t know where we can go with this?” “Yeah,” Martin said. “There is no one there.” In hindsight, Sneakers feels eerily prescient of a present now thwarted by anonymous bots and blatant misinformation. We all pull the trigger on our own digital vulnerability in one way or another. And yet there is hope in the conclusion, in which the team must make the best possible deal to save themselves. This suggests that apart from peace on Earth and goodwill toward men – amusingly proclaimed not to be the “kind of thing” done by the United States government – perhaps a kind of digital trigger is a relatively stable compromise. We got there once Sneakers suggests and, although it will be more difficult now, we could make it once again.