Sneakers is a 1992
caper film directed by
Phil Alden Robinson and written
by Robinson,
Walter F. Parkes and
Lawrence Lasker. It was filmed in late 1991
and released in 1992.
Cast
Plot
Martin Brice (
Robert Redford), a
hacker, has kept to his
assumed name of Martin Bishop after accidentally avoiding capture
and imprisonment for his activities in 1969, a fate that had fallen
on his friend Cosmo (
Ben Kingsley).
In the
present, Martin runs a tiger team of
"security specialists" that use unorthodox methods of testing
physical and electronic security for companies in San Francisco
. The team includes Donald Crease (
Sidney Poitier), a former
CIA agent and a high-strung family man; "Mother"
(
Dan Aykroyd), a
conspiracy theorist with unsurpassed
technical skills and
dexterity; Carl
Arbogast (
River Phoenix), a young
genius; and Erwin 'Whistler' Emory (
David Strathairn), a
blind man with superb hearing.
One day, Martin is
approached by two National Security Agency
agents, Dick Gordon and Buddy Wallace (Timothy Busfield, Eddie Jones), who reveal they are aware
of Martin's former life. In exchange for not incarcerating Martin, they ask Martin to
recover a "black box" decoder device that mathematician Gunter
Janek (Donal Logue) has been developing
for the Russian
government
under the guise of a company called "Setec Astronomy".
Martin's team, along with the help of his former girlfriend, Liz
(
Mary McDonnell), is successful in
retrieving the box, appearing as an
answering machine.
As the team celebrates, they become curious to the box's function
and begin to probe it. They learn that the box is a universal
decryption device, allowing them to access any system in the world,
as hinted by the
anagram of "Setec
Astronomy", "Too many secrets". Martin orders a
lockdown until they can return the device to the
NSA the next day. When Martin and Donald meet the agents to
exchange the device, Donald discovers that Janek was murdered, and
warns Martin off after he makes the exchange. The team soon learns
that Gordon and Wallace were never NSA agents, and that Janek
himself was working on the box for the NSA. Martin turns to a
friend from the Russian
consul, Gregor, who is able to
identify Gordon and Wallace as rogue agents.
Before Gregor can
reveal more, the two are caught by fake FBI
agents, who murder Gregor and frame Martin for it,
and then kidnap Martin.
Martin awakes in an unknown location to find his aged friend Cosmo.
Cosmo, bitter over being abandoned by Martin, reveals that he
developed ties with an
organized
crime family while incarcerated, using his hacking skills for
their benefit, and has been able to escape prison, and is now
planning to use the black box to destabilize the world's economy.
Cosmo offers Martin the chance to work with him towards this end,
but Martin refuses. Cosmo, in turn, uses the black box to connect
Martin's past with his present identity in police records, and then
has his men take Martin back to the city. Martin reunits with his
crew and has them relocate to Liz' apartment. There, they call the
NSA using complex call routing to prevent tracing and offer to
recover the box in exchange for
amnesty,
which is agreed to. With Whistler's help, Martin is able to
recreate the route during his kidnapping to a toy company, a front
for Cosmo. The team identifies Cosmo's office, its security
features, and the route to enter it, through the neighboring office
of Werner Brandes (
Stephen
Tobolowsky). To obtain the necessary vocal passkeys, the team
convinces Liz to go on a rigged
computer
date with Brandes.
Though most of the plan proceeds without a hitch, Brandes becomes
suspect of Liz' actions, and brings her to Cosmo, who seems ready
to ignore Brandes' story. However, when Liz mentions the computer
date, Cosmo believes Martin is at work, and locks down the
facility, trapping the team, and then discovers the box missing.
Cosmo tracks Martin to the building's rooftop where the rest of the
team is escaping, and demands the box at gunpoint. Martin
reluctantly hands over the box, and departs with the rest of the
team, but they are long gone before Cosmo discovers that Martin has
given him an ordinary answering machine. When Martin and his team
return to their offices the next day, they are surrounded by NSA
agents, who demand the box. Before Martin hands it over, he ask
that his record be cleared, which the agents agree to. Martin
prompts the other team members to realize that the NSA will yield
to any request to get the box, and they each request own personal
desires, the NSA agent unable to refuse. The box is handed over,
but after the agents leave, Martin reveals he took out the key
processor from the device, rendering it useless.
The last scene is a television news report: the reporter announces
that the
Republican
National Committee has misplaced its funds and entered
bankruptcy, while, simultaneously,
Amnesty International,
Greenpeace, and
The United Negro College Fund
are seeing record earnings, "due mostly to large, anonymous
donations."
Gross
| Domestic |
Foreign |
Worldwide Total |
| $51,432,691 |
$53,800,000 |
$105,232,691 |
Trivia
According to the filmmakers' DVD commentary,
- "Setec Astronomy" was a real program the NSA was funding at the
time of filming.
- One of the movie's researcher's name was Bob Abbott, sharing
the same last name as the movie's NSA agent Bernard Abbott.
- An early draft of the film for Cosmo's secret office was
conceived as a floating casino. The writers scrapped the idea,
finding it too "James Bond-ish".
- The final scene was re-shot for "about seven dollars",
re-involving Schenectady, NY news anchor Ernie Tetrault from
earlier in the film, who had reported on Bishop's friend Greg and
mathematician Janek's deaths. After writer Walter Parkes faxed the
monologue to Tetrault, he filmed the closing sequence after the
local 11 o'clock news that night and sent it back to the
filmmaker.
External links
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
