Thomas Crown Affair, The Review

Thomas Crown is a wealthy businessman, so wealthy he owns office buildings. He`s also an art collector, and if he can`t buy the paintings he covets he hatches the most elaborate plots to steal them. Catherine Banning is an insurance investigator who knows Crown`s the thief but falls in lust with him anyway...The original The Thomas Crown Affair, made in 1968, wasn`t much of a film but it did have Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway at their most charismatic and it did play around with split screen images intriguingly. The new film centres on surprisingly dull and detached performances from Pierce Brosnan, who also produced, and Rene Russo, who looks distinctly uncomfortable, especially in the sex scenes. It`s not the film`s fault that the recent Entrapment handled an almost identical plot with oodles more verve and sexual chemistry. John McTiernan, usually a reliable director, seems bored with the material and his heavy-handed treatment`s no help at all.