Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

Rolling Stone
"...Russo gives off enough carnal heat to singe the screen..." 09/02/1999 p.126

Entertainment Weekly
"...A puckish tribute to the art of stealing beauty..." -- Rating: B 09/24/1999 p.125

Box Office
"...This picture oozes glamour..." 10/01/1999 p.59

USA Today
"...Marvelously middle-aged Russo is a hot-stuff revelation here....The playfulness between the leads is the thing, and that's this AFFAIR's crowning achievement..." 08/06/1999 p.1E

Chicago Sun-Times
"...The movie has a low-key, luxurious feeling to it. It's languorous and comfortable..." 08/06/1999 p.33

ReelViews 6 of 10
For Pierce Brosnan, the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair (for which he gets a "producer" credit) is an opportunity to play James Bond without the action sequences...The Thomas Crown Affair is about capers and the cat-and-mouse game played by the criminal and the investigators; it's not about the mayhem with which Brosnan has become associated during the past five years...Despite the nearly-perfect casting of Brosnan in the title role, the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair comes across as a pale shadow of the 1968 original. That film, which starred Steve McQueen as the cool, amoral Crown and Faye Dunaway as the equally conscienceless insurance investigator dogging him, was a study in erotic tension. Thirty years later, eroticism has apparently become a lost art. The middle section of the film (the hour that is sandwiched between the two heists), which represented the meat of the 1968 production, is dull and flabby here. McQueen and Dunaway ignited the screen, and their 70-second kiss was a moment to behold. Brosnan and his co-star, Rene Russo, can't generate more than a few fitful sparks, and their sex scene (which lasts longer than 70 seconds and features plenty bare buttock and breast shots) is generic and uninteresting...Occasionally, remakes manage to present an enjoyable, contemporary spin on an older or foreign story. However, compared to the number of titles that botch things up, it's a pitifully small list, and The Thomas Crown Affair won't be on it. It goes without saying that those who are intrigued by the premise would do better to rent the video of the 1968 version. This new interpretation does few things better than the original, and many things worse, offering another argument for why Hollywood should stop strip-mining its past and start investing a little money in new, intelligent screenplays. Recycling works for paper, not celluloid. - James Berardinelli
 
Chicago Sun-Times 7 of 10
"The Thomas Crown Affair" uses a $100 million art theft as foreplay between two people who, unfortunately, are both more interested in the theft than in each other. Pierce Brosnan stars in the title role, as a man who has everything money can buy, and has moved on to what money can't buy--a $100 million Monet that he steals in broad daylight from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then he becomes interested in something money might be able to buy: an insurance investigator named Catherine Banning (Rene Russo)...The movie is a retread of Norman Jewison's 1968 film, which starred Steve McQueen as a millionaire bank robber opposite Faye Dunaway, and had a lot of split-screen photography that quickly wore out its welcome. The remake has a superior caper but less chemistry. The way Thomas Crown gets the painting out of the Met, and what happens to it subsequently, is really very cleverly devised. But while McQueen and Dunaway seemed barely able to keep their hands off each other, Brosnan and Russo play elegant mind games that sometimes seem almost designed to postpone the rumpy-pumpy...The movie has a low-key, luxurious feeling to it. It's languorous and comfortable. Brosnan and Russo seem to massage their words before saying them. But it all feels like an exercise. We don't sense that they're really important to each other: The game is more important for both of them than the prize...There's much more tension between Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in the recent, somewhat similar "Entrapment." I dunno. It's not a bad movie. It might be fun to see on an airplane or rent on video. Despite the cleverness of the caper and the beauty of the lush locations, the wit in the dialogue and the neat twists and turns, it never seems to risk anything. There's something odd about a caper romance where you never believe anyone is really ever going to go to jail or bed. - Roger Ebert