Sneakers

Sneakers; thriller / comedy, USA, 1992; D: Phil Alden Robinson, S: Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, David Strathairn, River Phoenix, Mary McDonnell, Stephen Tobolowsky

"Sneakers" are an organization of numerous hackers and computer specialists - 'Mother', Carl, Donald, Erwin - who test the security networks of banks to check if they have any weak spots. Their leader is Martin who has a dark secret - in '69, he hacked the US government computers to steal the money from Richard Nixon. He escaped, but his friend Cosmo was arrested. Now free, Cosmo presses Martin to find a special machine that can universally decipher any code. But, using a lot of tricks, Martin and his crew trick him, return the machine and gain immunity from the NSA.

The unusual film by Phil Alden Robinson, "Sneakers", is constructed as a stylish-moody coper thriller with an equally good function of a light dose of comedy, and which starts with a long take where it shows a television set that runs the dark past of the hero Martin, only for the camera to move away and then move on elegantly to him in the present (where he is played by Robert Redford). Throughly interesting and 'smooth', the film still reduced its grade due to cold approach and too long story: even the remaining final third of the film is engaging, but with a lesser intensity. The stand-out thing in the film, beside very competent direction, is the especially funny performance by Dan Aykroyd who plays 'Mother', a technical expert who is also, by the way, "burried" by conspiracy theories, which results in some deliciously comical lines, like "OK, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems" or "We'll get 20 years on the electric chair, that's what!"

Grade:++