You might feel sorry for Sean Connery as you watch Entrapment - if it is possible to feel sorry for this guy.
(It's not, actually - Connery has spent the last 40 years playing golf and bedding the likes of Ursula Andress onscreen - but indulge me anyway.)
Rent Entrapment and you will see the grandfatherly Sean Connery ogling the luminous Catherine Zeta-Jones as she slithers along the floor.
Kind of creepy, Sean.
See the 69-year-old Connery apply a third-degree whisker burn to the 30-year-old Zeta-Jones with his Santa beard during an amazingly tepid embrace.
As a female colleague would say, so gross.
Perhaps the most egregious example of vanity casting from a recent spate of movies - think Harrison Ford and Anne Heche, Clint Eastwood and any woman under 60 - Entrapment proved that Connery is finally just too old to be viable as a romantic lead - at least with a female co-star who could be Pussy Galore's granddaughter.
Connery was once People's Sexiest Man Alive and he's had a very long run as a heartthrob. And this is not to suggest that a sixtysomething person can't be sexy (you've got to be careful these days). But in this movie, the attempted Connery/Zeta-Jones coupling is just embarrassing to watch and that is a problem for a caper flick which is supposed to be as much about the sexual tension between the leads as the high-tech gadgets and intricate plans these cat burglar-types employ to steal fabulous works of art from what were considered impenetrable fortresses.
Mel Gibson or Hugh Grant, however, couldn't have elevated Entrapment, out on video this week. It is just utterly mediocre - not awful, but plodding and never more than mildly entertaining. Too often it asks the viewer to suspend too great a degree of disbelief.
Connery plays a legendary thief, while Zeta- Jones is the insurance investigator hot on his trail. She goes undercover to try to catch him in the act and there are supposed to be sparks - but not, as I said, under the covers. (Let's give thanks.)
Aside from the great gadgets, a caper flick needs a couple of tense sequences where you feel our anti-hero is only a half second away from detection by the security guard on his late-night rounds. Well, Entrapment does place its leads in jeopardy, but there is a distinct lack of tension in the scenes. And they are often in situations where the escape is so implausible that you are likely to be taken right out of the film - that is, if you weren't the first time that Zeta-Jones made goo-goo eyes at grandpa Sean.
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