by Lynn Lee
Sneakers turns 25 today, and until last week I’d never seen it. Although it came out when I was of moviegoing age, it was barely on my radar. All I remembered of it later was that it was about hackers and maybe also spies and the NSA, and I tended to confuse it with Hackers (which I’d never seen either). My husband was amazed to learn this, having seen Sneakers more times than he could count, and said I had to see it. But wouldn’t it be awfully dated now, I wondered? He insisted it still held up, despite admitting he hadn’t seen it in a while. There was only one way to find out…
Sneakers is dated, although not quite in the way I expected, and at the same time still timely and watchable. It’s always a little weird seeing something for the first time as a cultural artifact that was originally marketed as a contemporary tale of the very latest, cutting-edge computer tech. Obviously the tech is…no longer so. But what surprised me was how incidental it was to Sneakers, which is basically a heist flick masquerading as a hacker film. Think “Hackers’ Ocean’s 11” with a criminal super-hacker’s lair in lieu of a casino, Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier instead of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, David Strathairn, Dan Aykroyd, and River Phoenix as the supporting cogs and wheels, Ben Kingsley as the Adversary, and Mary McDonnell as the Girl, aka the One That Got Away.
The result is somewhat uneven tonally, as the movie – directed and co-written by Phil Alden Robinson (Field of Dreams, Band of Brothers, The Sum of All Fears) – has to balance between caper comedy and much darker themes related to government (or other) surveillance and the all-encompassing power of computer data. Particularly in the first half, when we don’t know whom to trust, there’s a lurking suggestion that this could develop into the kind of paranoid conspiracy thriller Redford knew all too well. Ultimately, though, the comedic elements (mostly) prevail; even the “black box” everyone is after, for all the fearsome power and potential for abuse it offers, is functionally a Macguffin. While the idea of a code-breaker that could break any kind of encryption is maybe even more relevant today than it was in 1992, in the movie it serves primarily as a vehicle for the purely personal dynamics between Redford and Kingsley’s characters.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The two actors are fun to watch even if they seem to be acting in different movies, which makes Kingsley come off as more cartoonish than he otherwise might. Yet his character’s fantasies about crashing the whole “system” and erasing all records of ownership would be explored much more extensively in other pop culture treatments – Fight Club, for example (both book and movie), and most recently the TV series Mr. Robot. It’s hard to tell how seriously we’re supposed to take these ideas in Sneakers. Not very, seems to be the final verdict. But the film does leave a lingering feeling that it’s trying to make a joke out of things that, on deeper thought, are more troubling than funny—and that have become even more troubling in the quarter century since then.
However, that’s entirely too dour a concluding thought for a movie that operates best as a diversion. So on a lighter note, here are 5 more Sneakers Surprises – i.e., things I did not expect at all but enjoyed.
1. David Strathairn as a blind man—who turns out to be the most compelling of the supporting crew. (River Phoenix, by contrast, just seems to be going through the motions.)
2. That Mary McDonnell (who’s delightful, despite the limitations of her role) seductively saying the word “passport” (to goober/fall guy Stephen Toblowsky) would get the biggest laugh out of me.
3. That I’d hear Sidney Poitier bellow “Motherfuckers mess with me, I’ll split your head!” SP must have loved that. It’s what Mr. Tibbs actually wanted to say.
4. Signs o’ the times: It’s called “computer dating” because “online” is not really a thing yet; the ex-Soviet spy associated with the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States – is that even still a thing?) commenting on how the last few years “have been very confusing for my work.” Not so confusing now, eh?
5. The fact that this movie was a major hit, grossing over $100 million at the box office. In 1992. Would it do as well today? Somehow, I doubt it.
Readers, have you seen Sneakers, and does it still hold up for you today?