The Thomas Crown Affair

****

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo, Denis Leary

Director: John McTiernan

Rating: M
Review: Russell Baillie

Thomas Crown makes James Bond look like an underpaid, undersexed, overworked civil servant.

Though playing squillionaire thief-for-thrills Crown in this liberal remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen caper, Bond du jour Brosnan manages to drop the 007 mantle quite nicely. And his tailored trousers, too, but in the best possible taste.

That follows after he and Russo's Catherine Banning, an insurance investigator who fingers Crown for the brilliantly cunning theft of a $100 million Monet from a New York museum, start a mutual admiration society during their cat-and-mouse chase. Which, of course, lands them in bed together. Once, that is, they've stopped going at it on the marble staircase.

A bit steamy then? Well, some might say The Thomas Crown Affair is the Viagra to Eyes Wide Shut's placebo.

But, yes, it is a remake and we all know how that usually works. They usually turn out like Entrapment, that tedious Sean Connery-Catherine Zeta Jones superthief flick from earlier this year. There is a connection. Connery had wanted to be in the original Thomas Crown but McQueen got the part.

When Brosnan thought to remake the movie 30 years later, scriptwriter Ron Bass was hired for an adaptation that was rejected but which he duly took to Bond, the elder, who roped in Zeta Jones, the very much younger.

One of the most pleasing elements of this "genuine" remake is that at least Brosnan and Russo are a match in the screen chemistry and chronology departments. The script is also tauter, twistier, trickier, wittier and closer in spirit to the Norman Jewison-directed original that wasn't (judging from a look at the recently re-released video) all that crash-hot anyway and now plays as a time capsule.

McTiernan, director of the first and third of the Die Hard series, shows a cooler delivery here, much of it pitched to Bill Conti's smoothly jazzy soundtrack (including a reworking of the original's Oscar-winning theme tune Windmills of Your Mind, though it overstays its welcome beneath one sequence).

Also returning is Faye Dunaway, who played opposite McQueen in the original but here turns up in a series of amusing scenes as Crown's shrink to whom he confesses that, despite being a self-made tycoon, he has commitment problems and an empty existence. What a 90's guy.

It is little wonder, then - we are happily sucked into believing - that purloining his favourite oil-on-canvas with the help of an elaborate heist is just the challenge he needs in life. It actually turns out that Banning is just the challenge he needs in life. Even if she may threaten both his playboy ways and his liberty.

It's slick, sexy and, only upon later reflection, just a bit silly. But it's an affair to remember.