Wolff rating: FAIR
Plot summary: Playboy billionaire entertains himself by fooling the police and getting away with crimes.
Biased, pithy comments: John Lennon is dead. As I watched the winking japes at authority (``Hey, pig, you can't hold back me!''), I realized this movie had somehow kept the Willy-Wonka fantasy element from the original ``Thomas Crown'' movie from the 60s. The problem with that fantasy is that reality is in vogue now, from ``Real Stories of the Highway Patrol'' to gritty urban dramas like ``N.Y.P.D. Blue.'' I found myself troubled by how narcisstic Crown and Banning are, and how little Leary's voice-of-reason detecive seemed to care. Paintings by old masters are legitmate treasures, and Thomas Crown is simply a felon---fire sprinklers alone do hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to a building. To my own discredit, I have to say also that Russo, who I fell in love with during ``Major League'' and ``Tin Cup'' looks kinda worn. I worried that she's getting too thin and I thought the wash they used to dye her hair made it look like she was hiding gray. Still, she looks great in the see-through dress, so I guess it was a balance. But I digress. I don't know why McTiernan remade this movie---it seems like a vanity project by someone who saw the movie when he was young and decided he could do it one better. In ``Die Hard,'' McTiernan had created a new genre by combining elements of old westerns with technology and terrorism, but here he seems to just be retreading the same waters and seems hopelessly out of date. Others, especially Baby Boomers, seem to like this better than I did.
Other Notes: 113min
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary.
Directed by: John McTiernan