What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 1992. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991
“You couldn’t make that movie now” is a dumb platitude, but every now and then, that sentiment rings true.
Theoretically, you could make “Sneakers,” the 1992 Robert Redford spy/heist film, in today’s Hollywood, but it’s not the kind of movie that often gets made today. It’s a charming, 2-hour, mid-level adult suspense drama that knows exactly what it is, with a star-studded cast full of veterans and newcomers. It’s like a cozy “Ocean’s 11” that routinely zigs when you expect it to zag.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have as much of a personal connection to this movie as I do to some of the others in this series. But it has become one of my favorites over the years, and I’ve watched it three times this year, including this viewing, now that it’s back on HBO Max.
If I had to pinpoint a reason why I like this movie so much, it’s probably because I started reading Robert Ludlum at entirely too early of an age (I used to bring “The Bourne Supremacy” to my Lutheran middle school every day for my silent reading time because I had seen the Bourne movies and wanted to see if the books were as good. That should tell you everything you need to know about me as a person) and then looked for anything I could find that had to do with spies and espionage. And then my dad found the VHS of this movie at a thrift store and recommended it to me, and I was hooked. I forgot about it until it hit streaming this year, but once I rewatched it, it was like reuniting with an old friend.
I’m not alone— apparently, this thing has had a cult following for a while, as devoted fans analyze the score, the codes and the script for any hidden secrets, just like the characters analyze codes.
And that’s because, as I said above, this movie surprises you, and it surprises you right from the jump. This is a movie about two “sneakers,” or security hackers, who look for ways to exploit government systems. That would imply some kind of techno music or industrial score, but James Horner’s strings are the first thing you hear as the credits roll on a black-and-white, square ratio flashback scene.
As the movie progresses, we learn that one of those sneakers, Martin (Robert Redford), has grown up and gone straight. Banks pay him now, and they pay him to see if he can break into their vaults. He can, and he’s good at it, but he’s nothing without his crack team made up of Dan Aykroyd, David Strathairn, Sidney Poitier and River Phoenix. Where most films would introduce his team by bringing in a new character so that Martin could explain everyone’s name and function to the team, “Sneakers” is content to do all of that through action, with its first heist scene telling you everything to know about these characters through the way they interact with each other. It takes its time, and it trusts the audience.
Another thing I like about this movie is that it predicted our current reality a little too well. Cosmo (Ben Kingsley), the other sneaker from the beginning of the movie, is right when he says that the power struggle of the future isn’t going to be about who has the most money, but about who controls the most information — information that will inevitably be delivered through 1s and 0s on a computer screen. That he says this while running his criminal enterprise out of a toy factory shell company just makes it even more prescient.
But what’s more, is this is a genre movie that is very down-to-earth and character-driven. The cast here truly does have some “Oceans”-level chemistry, and everyone looks like they’re having a ball, Redford the most of all (but Poitier’s angry delivery of this PG-13 rated movie’s one allotted use of “motherf——-” is also a joy to watch, up there with any of Samuel L. Jackson’s profanity).
So basically, this is an extended recommendation. Go watch this movie if you like seeing Robert Redford being charming and if you like watching heist movies where everyone is extremely good at their job.
They truly don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
Up next: We’re going to go to 1993, where Smalls learned who, exactly, the Great Bambino was in “The Sandlot.”
Letter of Recommendation
The “Sneakers” fandom is growing, and this series in Slate delves into why the film has become such a cult favorite. Scroll to the bottom of the article to see all the rest of the stories in that section.
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