In one of the late seventies Doonesbury strips, one of the characters laments that there has been nothing distinctive about the seventies except 50s revivalism (presumably referring to things like American Graffiti and Happy Days). Flash forward to the 90s and it turned out that there was enough distinctive about the seventies for the 90s to be a seventies-revival decade. We had new Columbo and Rockford Files episodes! And we had this, which is a 1992 film that feels an awful lot like the films Redford used to make in the 70s. Specifically, it's a lot like The Hot Rock, less like more serious fare like Three Days of the Condor, because it's largely comedic, except where Ben Kingsley comes in somewhere after halfway through to be the Big Bad, and he's silkily sinister (except that his American accent is decidedly dodgy and he looks silly when he runs). Basically, Jami was in the mood for a heist movie and this was one of the few ones that we hadn't seen that came up on one of those lists. It actually begins in 1969 with two proto-hackers using a phone to hack into bank accounts and donate money from people like Richard Nixon to organizations like the Black Panthers, when they get peckish and one of them (who will grow up to be Ben Kingsley) palms a coin to ensure that it is the other ("Young Robert Redford") who goes out for pizza. He's in his snow-covered VW Bus trying to start it when the feds come charging in and drag the other one off to prison, where he "dies". Meanwhile young Martin Cline (or something like that) becomes Marty Bishop and is next seen breaking into a bank with the help of his crack crew of Sidney Poitier (ex-CIA "Crease"), Dan Aykroyd (very "Lone Gunmen" esque as conspiracy theory-obsessed "Mother"), the electronics guy, Blind "Whistler" (David Strathairn, who would later come to prominence in the Redford-directed Quiz Show), whose hyper-sensitive hearing drives many a plot-point in this film, and the youngster Carl (River Phoenix, who would of course die the following year outside Johnny Depp's nightclub).
It turns out that they're not really robbing it - they're proving that it can be robbed, which is their job as a security consultant firm, which doesn't pay nearly so well. The next day, however, they are approached by two NSA agents who want Bishop and co. to steal a "black box" off a genius mathematician giving a visiting lecture at one of the local (it's San Francisco) universities. Bishop thinks it stinks, even though they explain that they can't do it because they're banned by act of congress, but they're driven by inter-agency rivalry (with the FBI and CIA), but just as he's walking out, one of them hands him his number and calls him by his real name (and the number is written on the back of his "Wanted" poster from back in the day). They promise to clean his file if he does it, but arrest him if he doesn't, so, naturally... And of course his buddies are all in (driven in part by the $170K they're offered - which, I must say, doesn't seem like much among the 5 of them, but I suppose inflation has changed things since the 90s). But he needs the help of a woman, he decides, and this is where his ex- played by Mary McDonnell (who has one of those faces that was popular in the early 90s - was she in China Beach? No, that's Dana Delaney. Northern Exposure? No, that's Janine Turner. No, she was in one of the TV Fargo serieses, and is probably known to most as the President in the respectable TV reboot of Battlestar Galactica).
Of course she doesn't want to be roped back in, but who can refuse Robert Redford, even middle-aged wrinkly Robert Redford? Getting the box turns out to be surprisingly easy, but at the party to celebrate their success, Whistler works out what it does - it decrypts anything. Turns out that's what the mathematician discovered, and he wired it in a chip. Well, it should be safe in the hands of the NSA, shouldn't it? But just as Marty has handed it over to the NSA guys, Crease (who is waiting in Marty's smart little orange Karman Ghia) spots a newspaper item about how the mathematician has been murdered, and he gets Marty out of there. Those guys were not NSA, and it turns out they were not the Russians either (yes, I know this is post-fall-of-the-Wall, and pre-Putin, but they go over that). So whom? Well, you've probably guessed. This leads up to the final heist of the film being retrieving the box so that the real NSA don't lock Bishop up. Shenanigans ensue.
Overall: pleasant and non-taxing. They didn't even make 'em like that any more in 1992.
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