Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Anderson Tapes Blu-ray Movie Review

A low-tech prelude to a high-tech world.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman June 3, 2013

Imagine stepping into a world where there's a camera on every corner and up along each wall, where banks of monitors display the most mundane, the silliest, the most serious, the most private of moments of everyday life, where simple phone lines are transformed into complex listening devices, where anyone and everyone could be wired up for sound. That's a Sunday afternoon football game now and a given -- though certainly not always an appreciated or necessary or even warranted or welcome -- way of life in Y2K+13. In 1971, however, it was all pretty much state of the art boogeyman 1984 type of stuff that nobody had ever seen before and had only read about in dystopian novels warning of excess big brother intrusions into privacy. The Anderson Tapes takes the Caper movie and blends it with what was amongst the first of its kind, the high-tech surveillance Thriller. Sure it's all quite tame and silly in hindsight -- shoot, even the terrifying Enemy of the State no longer really seems in the least bit far-fetched or futuristic -- but it's still a chilling, albeit a dated and very goofy, look back at the beginnings of the all-seeing eye and the all-hearing ear, in this film weaved into a tale of how all the wires get crossed and a heist is put into place even when the camera isn't looking the other way.

Real men sleep in pink.

Duke Anderson (Sean Connery) is fresh-out-of-prison off a ten-year sentence. The ex-safe cracker's first task: reunite in the sack with his former girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon). His second? Hatch a scheme to rob her apartment building blind. It's his most ambitious idea yet, and why not? The building is a goldmine of New York's wealthiest. There's only one problem: He finds himself in a changed world, one dominated by surveillance cameras, wiretaps, and other not-so-secretive spy equipment watching his, and everyone else's, every move. Nevertheless, he moves forward with his plan, enlisting the help of several ex-cons, including a former drug dealer (Christopher Walken). The plan: map out the building and the contents therein, pull up a moving van to the door, and pack it full of treasures. It sounds simple enough, but when Anderson is forced to involve the mob in the planning stages, he's helped only if he agrees to off a particularly nasty man from the inside, Socks (Val Avery). Will this be the perfect crime or the perfect foiled plot in a brave new world of constant surveillance?

They say there's now more computing power in a wristwatch than what it took to send a man to the moon decades ago. That's progress. And that's not the only area that's seen progress. Things have gotten faster and, maybe more importantly, smaller. Significantly smaller. To be sure, high tech surveillance back in the day wasn't really all that, how to say it, nuanced. All of the things that play a key role in the movie -- banks of black and white monitors, amateur radio (admittedly still a wonderful and under-appreciated tool even in today's world), bulky reel-to-reel tape recording devices, clumsy cameras -- are all pretty much now combined in the palm of just about everyone's hand in the ubiquitous iPhone. Shoot, even the newly announced Xbox apparently won't let gamers play a round of Halo without the Kinect's prying eye seeing all and its microphone hearing everything. The Anderson Tapes' filmmakers probably couldn't believe what only forty-some years have produced, a major leap in technological evolution that places roomfuls of machines in the back pocket, and with significantly more power and precision to boot. In that light, the movie barely gets off the ground in hindsight viewing; it's like a kid from the Call of Duty generation pausing to play a game of Pong and crying foul about its antiquity, lack of options, absence of color, and so on, but it's at least interesting to see the origins of the high tech world at work in a film. If only technology -- or at least its nefarious uses -- matured as gracefully as star Sean Connery.

Connery is quite the suave dude in The Anderson Tapes, but that's really par for the course for a Connery film. He has a few choice lines, beds the attractive woman, and takes the lead role in the film's central conflict. In other words, it's all classic Connery in the middle of a strong cast that includes an infectious early performance from legend-in-the-making Christopher Walken and the then-already legendary Martin Balsam, amongst others. The cast gels nicely, though certainly most beyond Connery and Dyan Cannon really don't enjoy any sort of extensive development. Even Connery carries his character more on charisma than scripted character nuance, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, Network), even through the film's fairly deliberately choppy and sometimes even jarring editing, juggles the extended character roster, the high tech gadgets and gizmos, and the caper complexities with relative ease. The picture's style is hopelessly dated, but even decades removed from its christening it's still relatively easy to fall into the rhythm and enjoy the film as Lumet has assembled it.

Yet for the star power and all of the antique gadgets and even Lumet's weirdly styled direction, editing, and soundtrack, the film is at its finest when it's focused on the heist. It's a refreshing change-of-pace to witness the planning and execution of such a grand scale job; most movies settle for a single vault or location but The Anderson Tapes dares to stretch things out to an entire apartment complex filled with New York's wealthiest and, as it tuns out, most oddly eccentric individuals, from the granny who begs the thieves to take everything to the slime ball who won't surrender the code to his safe even when his wife is directly threatened with violence. Lumet keeps it rolling with a combination of serious and playful, mounting tension even in a rather comical middle-film scene in which the main members of the crew simultaneously enter the building but cannot quite overwhelm the front desk man. It never drags, even in the extended heist execution in the final act and particularly when Lumet cuts away to the police and chronicles their rather extended and quite low tech approach to infiltrating the building.

The Anderson Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Anderson Tapes is another Sony titled churned out by the Mill Creek video factory that looks satisfactory-to-good. Generally, the picture enjoys a solid film-like texture, with a grain overlay that's occasionally uneven but never too spiky. Details are fine; this is definitely not a razor-sharp modern film, but the resolution, combined with good source elements, results in crisp, accurate details on clothes, faces, and general backgrounds, particularly the varied apartments throughout the building which open up some visual flavor and variety as they're entered one at a time for the robbery. The hotel lobby also enjoys some nicely defined woods, tiles, and marbles. Colors are neither bold nor dull; the palette is acceptable but certainly not one to provide a beautiful bouquet of exploding color. Wear and tear is minimal, as is banding and other intrusive eyesores. Black levels are fine, ditto flesh tones. It's not the world's best picture, but for what amounts to a decent movie appearing on Blu-ray for single-digit dollars, it's more than acceptable.

The Anderson Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Anderson Tapes features a fairly straightforward DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 lossless soundtrack. It proves rather shallow, limited not only by the two channel presentation but the underwhelming source. It's very front heavy and oftentimes tinny, with a shallow feel to most everything but dialogue and those godawful piercing electronic sounds that pop in from time to time to transition between scenes or accentuate a moment. Range? What range? This one is almost the sole property of the front-middle; don't expect it to go very wide very often. Fortunately, dialogue is rather smooth and balanced. This is a serviceable track, nothing more, nothing less.

The Anderson Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This Blu-ray release of The Anderson Tapes contains no supplemental content.

The Anderson Tapes Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Modern audiences will be hard-pressed to find a more laughably dated "high-tech" movie than The Anderson Tapes, but that doesn't make it a negative experience in the 21st century world. Quite the contrary, it makes for a nice little compliment and contrast to the sort of 24/7, every-inch-surveyed world that currently exists, showing how technology has come a long way but also that there's been no, or maybe negative, evolution on how it's used to see and hear everything. The goofy "future" font and the annoying beeps and bloops give the film a silly throwback feel to a "simpler" time in the electronic age, ironic considering just how prescient it feels today and how involved a part the electronics play in the movie. The movie finds its best during the heist; there's sometimes a little too much clutter beforehand, but overall it's a solid picture that modern audiences should find appealing after those initial chuckles. Mill Creek's Blu-ray release of The Anderson Tapes features solid video, mediocre audio, and no supplements. Recommended.