I must confess that movie trailers (previews) can be effective. Often they are annoying—giving away too much of the plot and too many of the good jokes and surprise scenes. Sometimes I will watch a trailer and decide that I don’t need to see the movie because I know everything important that is going to happen in the movie. Sometimes the trailer actively discourages me from seeing a movie that I might otherwise go see because the trailer was just plain weird (what were the marketing guys for Elizabeth thinking?) On the other hand, a trailer can convince you to go see the movie. Take Godzilla (please!). Great marketing and clever previews brought people to the opening weekend in droves—I don’t believe for a minute that word-of-mouth from people who actually saw Godzilla brought anyone to the theatre at all, ever. A single scene from the trailer for this month’s movie, Enemy of the State absolutely convinced me to see the movie. In the scene, Will Smith’s and Gene Hackman’s characters are driving away at high speed as a giant explosion occurs behind them. "What did you do?" says Will Smith’s character. "I blew up the building." responds Gene Hackman. "Why?" says Will. "Why? Because you made a phone call, that’s why." Clever dialogue—extremely understandable in the context of the movie—and an exchange that could have taken place in every session of Top Secret I ever played. Things always went awry in our Top Secret rounds: characters bungled passwords, spies knocked off innocent civilians, agents used acrobatic and stealth skills to attempt to enter a compound that could have been breached with the most elementary fast-talk, instructions to maintain a low profile were ignored, and things got blown up—many, many things got blown up. So I just had to see if the rest of Enemy of the State ran as a spy role-playing game would and if the movie characters did things that even gamers—even gamers who are terrible, terrible spies—would know better than to do.

The movie itself was extremely good. The pace was quick, most of the action was well done and reasonably credible, the editing and direction (especially the visual presentation of hi-tech monitoring) were clean, cool, and modern, Will Smith wise-cracked with alacrity, but maintained his character as an upper-middle class attorney, the bad guys were bad without being cartoony, and Gene Hackman gave an effective and subtle performance of a guy who revels in the technical aspects of the espionage game even though it cost him a normal life. More importantly, the computer geeks who operate the equipment for the NSA seem pretty realistic—they enjoy the game even though they realize when they are doing it that maybe they shouldn’t. Sure, some of the technology was, frankly, non-credible. I can believe that the government can tap phones and credit transactions and hotel rooms with incredible speed and accuracy long before I will ever believe that a store security camera can rotate a photo 75 degrees in three dimensions and enhance with sufficient clarity to analyze the shadows of a bulge in a shopping bag. But then, this was a security camera from a lingerie store in which all of the clerks were aspiring models wearing nothing but the store’s silky products, so the scene was already far removed from reality (though not from the average Bond mentality of a spy role-playing game). Most importantly, the movie had the finer aspects of any good espionage game—namely the characters started ad libbing when they got caught by the bad guys in a way that was totally unexpected, leaving the other good guy(s) trying to figure out on the fly what the plan was and how to go along with it and use it to the group’s advantage. This is espionage at its very best, though when I tried this kind of thing in the spy games I played, the other players would never follow my lead or they would try to go along but say something stupid or the GM would have the cops, the harbor patrol, and the Coast Guard all show up on scene in less than 30 seconds in order to thwart my clever ad libbed plan. So, in some sense the characters in this movie are smarter, much smarter than many of the gamers I have played with in spy games (but I’m not egotistical or bitter at all, really!).

On the other hand, some things are done that even the more stupid of the spy gamers I know would be clever enough to avoid. For example, knowing that the full weight of the security apparatus of the government (all levels) is arrayed against him and that if he is found, he is almost certainly dead (probably after being tortured for information he does not have and so cannot give), our hero goes back to his own house to hide in the garage! Gee, can’t he find an all-night Denny’s or something? No clever person on the run has done something this stupid in a movie since Tom Cruise’s character did the same incredibly bone-headed thing in Mission Impossible. Of course, at least Will Smith’s character in the current movie isn’t portraying a trained agent. But then, he also has a public rendezvous with a female character after his wife has already received long-lens photos of his preceding meet with the woman, then later circles back and enters her apartment—another likely place to be staked out by the bad guys—only to find her dead. Of course, he touches the body and gets blood on himself. Sure he retrieves the clues that the bad guys left strewn obviously about to frame him for the murder, but only after removing his winter gloves so he can leave fingerprints all over the apartment. Any gamer knows you never touch the body or the murder weapon or the blood (okay, so maybe you touch the body, but only if you are going to loot it—some spy gamers just can’t shrug off their fantasy role-playing habits). He also fails to follow very explicit instructions as to when to leave a stake-out position because he is traceable and promptly gets caught for his stupidity. Of course, many of my fellow gaming spies were too stupid or too macho to stick with a known plan, too. The movie is also flawed by a 555 number and a continuity glitch near the end. Still, this is a much better spy flick than you usually get at the movies, with only enough problems to let you feel smugly superior that you could have done even better had the movie been an espionage role-playing game.