Sneakers Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Sneakers Blu-ray Movie Review

The Gang that Couldn't Compute Straight

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 1, 2015

Sneakers is one of those Hollywood cocktails that has more fizz than substance (and was criticized for it at the time), but somehow manages to satisfy through the sheer wattage of its combined star power. I remember first seeing the trailer and wondering how anyone could manage to get into one film a cast that included Robert Redford, Sidney Poitier, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd, Mary McDonnell, David Straithairn and River Phoenix (a rising star until his life was cut short by a drug overdose the year after Sneakers' release). And that's without even taking into account some of the smaller roles I didn't even know about yet, including several returnees from director and co-writer Phil Alden Robinson's previous film, the now-classic, Field of Dreams.

As Robinson and writers Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes describe in the entertaining documentary that appeared on the 2003 DVD, Sneakers went through dozens, if not hundreds of drafts over many years while the writers worked on other projects. The script that ultimately emerged was primarily a comic caper with just enough serious moments to give the comedy an edge, plus a sliver of dime-store philosophy about the information age that had become outdated even before the film reached theaters. Still, when the cast is this good, who cares how antique the technology, how specious the rhetoric or how improbable the plot? The fun is in watching this group of seasoned pros and relative newcomers bounce and ping off each other and the supporting cast, with Robinson leaving them plenty of room to maneuver but (as he reveals in his commentary) always maintaining an overview of how the scene should ultimately play.

A group of so-called "sneakers" have formed a borderline-legitimate security firm in San Francisco under the leadership of Martin "Marty" Bishop (Redford). Banks and other secure facilities hire Bishop & Associates to break into them, then report on their vulnerabilities. With the exception of former CIA Agent Donald Crease (Poitier), everyone on Bishop's team has had trouble with the law. "Mother" (Aykroyd) is a thief, electronics genius and whacked-out conspiracy nut, who did time for breaking and entering. "Whistler" (Strathairn), a blind phone-freak with exceptionally discriminating ears, was indicted for defrauding the phone company. Teenaged Karl (Phoenix) got caught "upgrading" his computerized high school transcript.

Bishop has the darkest past of all, though none of his associates know it. In 1969, Bishop, who was then known as "Martin Brice" (played as a student by Gary Hershberger) and his college pal, Cosmo (Jo Marr), were caught hacking into the bank accounts of Republican politicians to give their money to do-gooder causes. Cosmo went to jail, while Brice changed his name and escaped to Canada, because he happened to be out getting pizza when the authorities arrived. It's the opening scene of the film, and it establishes a running theme of deception, concealment—and luck.

Over twenty years later, trouble arrives in the form of two men, Gordon and Wallace (Timothy Busfield and Eddie Jones), with NSA credentials who know all about Marty's secret past. Although Bishop has a policy against taking jobs for the government, Gordon and Wallace make him an offer he can't refuse. They'll clean up his record if Marty and his team do one small task for them. It involves a scientist named Dr. Janek (Donal Logue), whose work in cryptography may be a threat to national security. If Bishop says no, his past may catch up to him.

Everything about this offer stinks, but the usually cautious Bishop is rattled by having his cover blown, and he says yes. (After watching the scene in which Gordon and Wallace get him to agree, listen to Robinson's commentary describing how he blocked it; it's a great lesson in directing.) From this point on, the plot grows increasingly twisted, as Bishop & Associates find themselves batted back and forth among the NSA, FBI, post-Cold War Russia (represented by the wonderful George Hearn as a former Soviet spymaster named Gregor) and a mysterious organization headed by Ben Kingsley's sleek mastermind, whose headquarters is disguised as a toy company. Along the way, Bishop's team is joined by his ex-girlfriend, an intellectual piano teacher named Liz (McDonnell), who swears that she and Marty are not getting back together but still cares enough for him to endure several dates with Werner Brandes (Stephen Tobolowsky), a socially inept toy designer with a license plate that reads "180 IQ".

Robinson keeps the mood light through banter, through inspired reaction shots (at which Redford excels), through visual gags like the one that occurs when Marty first sees Liz at the piano, and through old-fashioned slapstick (e.g., the almost obligatory scene of a blind man driving a vehicle). Moments of tension are achieved by camera work, editing rhythms and atmosphere. Several deaths occur in Sneakers, but they are either off-screen or photographed in such a way that, by themselves, they'd only get the film a PG. The reason for the PG-13 rating are the scenes involving Dr. Janek's Czechoslovakian girlfriend, Dr. Elena Rhyzkov (Lee Garlington), and one particular line spoken by Poitier's Crease, which, according to Robinson, is the only filmed occurrence of the great actor uttering a particular curse word. (For a tribute to Poitier, Robinson mischievously edited together every take of just the one line. What an extra that would make!)

When it comes to social philosophy, however, Sneakers is best enjoyed as the nonsense it is. Indeed, it has aged rather well, because no one has to pretend to take the bad guy's raving seriously, even for a moment. "There's a war out there!" he says. "A world war! And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think . . . it's all about the information!" That insight was already familiar when Martin Bishop was in college, and the fact that information is now expressed digitally and widely available on the internet may have sped things up, but it hasn't changed the basic principle. If Sneakers disappointed some viewers upon release, it was only because the title seemed to promise something new, but the film turned out to be a traditional tale about guilty secrets, whacky characters and knowing the difference between your friends and your enemies.

Sneakers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

John Lindley, who shot Field of Dreams for Robinson (and most recently St. Vincent), describes many of the practical challenges presented by the cinematography of Sneakers on the commentary track, where he participates with the director, although he is not listed. For example, the opening college section in 1969 takes place during a snowstorm that fades to a snowy TV screen in the present, with the red glare of police lights transitioning to the red glow of electronics; specific qualities of film stocks and lenses made this transition challenging. (Today it would be massaged digitally.)

Universal's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray appears to be derived from the same transfer used on its previous HD-DVD release of Sneakers, which was encoded with VC-1, and is probably the same transfer previously used for DVD. Along with being re-encoded, the Blu-ray presentation appears to have been somewhat cleaned up, with fewer pock marks and speckles. Otherwise, the detail, colors, densities and black levels are roughly comparable, which isn't necessarily a compliment. Colors are nicely saturated, especially the primaries of computer monitors and electronic equipment in darkened rooms, vans, crawl spaces and access tunnels where Bishop and his cohorts ply their trade. The brighter spaces of Liz's apartment, which get converted into a temporary "sneaker" HQ, are equally colorful, but with a much warmer and softer palette, and the scenes inside Ben Kingsley's lair are steely cold.

The biggest concern with this image is its lack of dimensionality. There is a flatness to the image, an absence of depth and texture, which results from the lack of fine detail and a kind of digital "mushiness" of the sort that often gets "corrected" with electronic sharpening. (Fortunately, that doesn't appear to have happened here.) A new, hi-resolution scan would be required to restore Sneakers to its original look, along with a greater effort to capture the film's grain structure. It's not that grain isn't visible, but it lacks the organic quality that makes an image film-like. Sneakers has always been a dark film, but the Blu-ray seems excessively so. With better depth and detail, and also with finer differentiation of color, the darkness would be less of an issue.

Universal has encoded Sneakers at a high bitrate of 32.98 Mbps. It's nice to have the bandwidth, but the film needed a new transfer to take full advantage of all those bits.

Sneakers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Sneakers was released in Dolby Stereo Surround, but the era of multi-channel digital tracks was just around the corner, and the original stems must have been preserved, because the 5.1 remix, which also appeared on HD-DVD in Dolby Digital Plus, sounds very natural in its presentation on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA. Note, however, that if you are used to the HD-DVD, the DD+ mix was mixed much "hotter" than the Blu-ray's track. The Blu-ray must be turned up much louder to achieve the same effect.

The surrounds are effectively and frequently used for environmental sounds: of van interiors, tunnels, limousines, the headquarters of Bishop & Associates, San Francisco street locations, tight crawl spaces, a lecture given by Dr. Janek, even a concert at the Russian consulate. In one key sequence, a villain addresses someone hiding in a building over its P.A. system, and the voice changes timber, quality and direction as the camera's POV cuts to points throughout the structure. Several critical sound effects that cannot be identified without giving away plot points are realistically reproduced, and the dialogue is clear throughout. James Horner's cleverly jaunty score rises and falls at just the right points. Horner's work is essential to maintaining Sneakers' spell; his music reassures us that, yes, this film about serious-sounding subjects remains a light-hearted comedy, at least most of the time.

Sneakers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Universal first released Sneakers on DVD in 1998, with only a trailer. A "Collector's Edition" was released in 2003 with additional special features, including a commentary with Robinson and his two co-writers (. For its HD DVD release, Universal ported over the "Making Of" documentary and trailer but supplied a different commentary, featuring Robinson and cinematographer John Lindley (although the menu mistakenly listed the DVD commentary with the writers). The HD DVD features are the ones that have been ported over to Blu-ray (so keep the DVD, if you have it, to retain both commentaries):

• Commentary with Co-Writer/Director Phil Alden Robinson and Cinematographer John Lindley: Although Robinson exhibits his fair share of hero worship, especially of Redford and Poitier, he and Lindley mostly stick to the nuts and bolts of shooting the film, with detailed descriptions of the logistics of creating the sets, blocking the scenes and cast interactions. (Example: An actor playing a henchman found it difficult to say his line to Poitier, because it contained a racial slur. Poitier took him aside and specifically asked him to say it, because "it will help with my performance".) If one thinks of a director's job as problem-solving, then the Sneakers commentary is essential listening.



• The Making of Sneakers (480i; 1.33:1; 40:04): This documentary has a copyright date of 2000, but the interviews appear to have been done much closer to the film's release. In the first part, Robinson, Lasker and Parkes discuss the lengthy writing process, sitting together at one point around a table heaped with drafts and manuscripts. Also interviewed are Prof. Len Adelman, a mathematics consultant who, among other contributions, wrote the speech delivered by Dr. Janek, and John Draper a/k/a "Captain Crunch", a famous hacker whose history supplied elements for the character of Cosmo. In the second part of the documentary, Robinson and his co-writers discuss the characters and story that emerged from the long writing process, supplemented by interviews with the principal cast.



• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1.85:1; 2:52): The trailer makes the film seems like much more of a thriller than it actually is.

Sneakers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Sneakers isn't deep or profound, but it is entertaining. Over the years, I have seen it dozens of times on cable TV, because whenever I happen to find it while switching channels, I always get sucked in. Each time, I find myself noticing some new twitch of Redford's expression, or I'm surprised again at one of "Mother's" nutty conspiracy theories (which, according to Robinson, were tame compared to those that Dan Aykroyd related on the set). It's regrettable that Universal has not done a new transfer, but at least most of the DVD extras have been included. For those who do not already own it in another form, the disc may be worth acquiring (at an appropriate bargain), just for the movie itself.