Thoughts on The Anderson Tapes

-Sean Connery plays a recently released con who gathers up a gang to rob his girlfriend's apartment building, followed by a shitload of both private and police wires, hence the title.

-What's interesting about this movie is that it's all about the pervasiveness of surveillence, both blatant and inconspicuous, but it was filmed years before Watergate.

-Also, Christopher Walken is, like, twenty here, and he looks all pretty and shit, but when he talks, he still sounds like Christopher Walken. Taking orders from Connery, you wonder when he's gonna go all Headless Horeman on the fool.

-Seriously, this is what he looks like:



-Quincy Jones's score is terrible. Just terrible. All keyboard-induced cartoon bleeps.

-These guys, this ragtag bunch of criminals--The Kid (Walken), a safecracker released at the same time as Duke Anderson (Connery), Pop, also at the same time, but after some decades, getaway driver Spencer (Dick Anthony Williams), and gay antiques dealer Tommy (Martin Balsam, playing flamboyant up to eleven, who I guess is there to judge what goods are worth stealing), would all probably be the best team ever if they all weren't hilariously incompetent with then-recent technology. If they were, they'd have realised, for one, that they were being watched by dozens of teams for dozens of seperate, unrelated reasons, not to mention crack a safe clean. Each has either spent years in jail, or is just not up to date.

-There's the girlfriend, Connery's, who's name I can't remember, who seems to only be there as the gateway plot device and required love interest. She gets some fine lines, I guess, and was played a bit less one dimensional than she could've been. The hostages for the eventual heist are given bits of backstory and development, and some are quite funny.

-Right. Anyway. Is dull for its first hour, then grows into an enticing caper. Yeah.

-It's also really, really homoerotic.