***SPOILERS***

This remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is both better and worse than the original. Although the plot is much the same, it's a different and much smarter heist, a heist eventually resolved in a much more intelligent, amusing way. But the original had a better ending than this film, and Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo aren't a patch on Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. And there's no denying that the directorial gimmicks in the original make it a lot of fun to watch.

But putting the original out of mind as much as possible, what's The Thomas Crown Affair like? It opens well with the theft of a $100 million Monet from New York's Metropolitan Museum, a smart, complicated, legerdemainy robbery, which ends with Thomas Crown walking out of the Met with the Monet in his briefcase (and if anyone can explain to me how he managed to fold the painting in half to fit it in there, please mail me!). Bored M&A billionaire Crown (Brosnan) is a spare-time art collector, and what he ca'n't buy he steals. After all, when you've conquered the world of commerce, you have to find your challenges in *something*. He seems to have more trouble with relationships. In a nice touch (albeit a pointless role), Faye Dunaway plays his psychiatrist, to whom he talks about his problems with women (basically intimacy-phobia combined with the difficulty of finding someone with a similarly devious mind to his own).

Enter a very devious woman indeed, Catherine Banning (Russo), the investigator for the insurance company forced to pay out to the Met. She becomes convinced Crown is the thief, and sets out to capture him. Of course, she soon finds herself falling for him: their minds run along similar, amoral, self-involved tracks. They are two of a kind, and soon she finds herself torn between her commitment to her job and the knowledge that if she pursues the investigation to its conclusion, she may be separating herself forever from the only man she could have a real relationship with. For his part, he has finally found someone who can understand and empathize with the way his mind works. Eventually he tells her he will put the painting back, leaving it up to her to decide whether or not to spill the beans and have him caught red-handed.

I wo'n't spoil the ending, which is good, although without the impact of the original. I will say that the operation to put back the painting is brilliant. Although I had guessed the "surprise" part of it about halfway through the film, it was still a pleasure to see how the plan was executed, and knowing what the outcome would be didn't in the least diminish my enjoyment of it.

In between the two capers, the movie relies on the mind games going on between Banning and Crown. She tells him straight out from the start that she knows he was the thief and that she's going to get him, and from then on their relationship is as much a battle of wits as anything else. Both of them are turned-on by the contest between them, each finally finding a worthy adversary, and it's not long before they end up in bed together. This is where this film falls apart for me. I didn't think there was much chemistry between the two leads, although I was delighted to finally see two forty-somethings put together, instead of a forty-something man and a twenty-something woman. Maybe Hollywood has finally woken up to the fact that relationships are more interesting and more beliveable when the partners have a similar level of life experience behind them. However, despite this I thought the sex scenes utterly awful. The infamous chess-game in the original movie, for all its tackiness, sizzled off the screen. Here, everything is far more direct, and far less sexy. We see slow dissolves of naked body-doubles writhing around on the marble steps of Crown's townhouse, and frankly, it doesn't look erotic, it just looks painful. Wondering which of the two was going to put their back out first didn't do much to suck me into their blistering passion.

Part of the fault for this lies with Brosnan: he's so super-suave here it's impossible to imagine him wrinkling a suit or mussing his hair in romantic clinches. His idea of cool and sophisticated is a bit naff, and lacks the dark edge Steve McQueen brought to the part, but his classical good looks are ideal for the smoothie billionaire role. The real problem is with Rene Russo, or rather with the rewritten female part. Faye Dunaway's Vicky Anderson was a great character because she was so contradictory: she combined an aggressive, masculine style of thinking with a deliciously feminine flirtatiousness. Rene Russo's character was obviously meant to be feisty and spirited (hence the dyed red hair) but she comes across as a scary, man-eating ball-breaker. She has said that she had her own ideas about the character, that she would be more elegant than we see in the movie, but was talked around by Brosnan and director John McTiernan (Die Hard). Backing down was a serious mistake. When the character is introduced, instead of seeing her face the camera focusses on the garter peeking out through a waist-high slit in her skirt. Classy? I think not. Throughout the film we see her caked in cosmetics and wearing one embarrassingly cheap-tramp costume after another. Her outfits are so bizarre that soon I was shaking with laughter every time she walked into the frame. Rene Russo is a beautiful woman with a great body: she doesn't need inch-thick makeup and trollopy clothes to look sexy. Catherine Banning is supposed to be classy and sophisticated, a match for Crown in every way - Rene as her usual blonde, polished self would have been far better.

Denis Leary plays Detective Michael McCann, the cop who disapproves of Catherine's unorthodox tactics. His character is nicer than in the original - more sympathetic to her - and is well played by Leary in a straight role, although he lays on the empathetic glances a bit thick.

Director John McTiernan has moved away from his action background to shoot this movie, and in some ways he makes a good job of it. He shows us a beautifully sleek, glamorous New York, a perfect setting for Banning and Crown. The robberies bookending the film are nicely done, the camera fluid enough to keep us interested and give us a sense of the complicated machinations going on. And he really comes to life in the action scenes - when we see Crown taking part in a dangerous catamaran race we can feel the slap of the waves and taste the sea air. But I found the direction in the rest of the movie a little flat.

In fact, I found the film overall a little flat. Since it revolves around the relationship between the two leads, it's not surprising I thought the movie was missing something given my views on the lack of chemistry between them. The blatant product placement also drove me crazy. Yes, filmmakers have to get their props from somewhere, but when props seem to be introduced for *no other reason* than to show us a maker's name (and I'm talking about you, Bulgari) things are getting ridiculous. That apart, however, particularly if you're not comparing it against the original, The Thomas Crown Affair is a good evening's entertainment. And for all its faults, as a movie about intelligent grown-ups playing mind games rather than sex games, it provides a refreshing change from the dross vomited out by Hollywood this summer.

(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999

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