As for the "Where's Waldo" aspect, the movie features so many of Hollywood's young actors, it almost plays like a game of "Spot the Actor".Included are Barry Pepper("Saving Private Ryan"), Loren Dean("Gattaca"), Seth Green("Austin Powers"), Jamie Kennedy("Scream") and Jason Lee("Chasing Amy"). Other actors in small parts include Tom Sizemore and even Gabriel Byrne.

As the leader of this rogue agency, Jon Voight turns in only a fair performance. He's the easily identifiable bad guy, sure, but we rarely sense any sort of danger from his character. The only interesting bad guys are the kids who seemingly run the whole thing, from the Seth Green character to the Loren Dean character. These characters seem like kids who graduated from surfing the internet to intercepting signals from global satellites. It's unfortunate that, like myself in my recent college midterms, the movie is in an incredible hurry to get the whole thing over with. We don't get much of the background on any of the characters except for bits and pieces on Smith's character, Robert Dean.

Gene Hackman, as Smith's only friend in the whole matter, comes in far too late in the movie to build much interest in the character; it's not Hackman, it's the fact that, like many of the other supporting cast, he's just not given too terribly much to say or do.

The movie flys by with the exception of a few quiet scenes for the audience to take a breath. I may have given a sense that I didn't like the movie in the previous paragraph, but that's not entirely true. There are a lot of scenes in the film that work very, very well and overall, I enjoyed it. It has a great sense of paranoia going for it and some very well done action scenes. It's just one of those films that goes by so quickly that it's not until afterwards that you begin to consider it's faults. Still, Tony Scott has done an outstanding job, at least technically, with this film and it's array of dazzling gadgets that follow Robert Dean through his life. The satellite shots, the camerawork, it's all bright, fast and mostly, it'll have you on your seat's edge.

It's unfortunate, though, that Scott couldn't have put together a film that works as well as his "Crimson Tide" did. That was a great, smart thriller that had the element of claustrophobia in its closed confines of a neuclear millitary submarine. I would have liked a little bit of a "cramped" nature in this film to add to some sort of sense of danger and peril for our hero. Slight complaints, though, in a film that works enough during it's running time to recommend it. "Enemy" is at least much more satisfying, much more exciting and much richer entertainment than many of the "big" event pictures this year.

THE DVD:
VIDEO QUALITY: An excellent non-anamorphic 2.35:1 transfer. Time and time again, Disney refuses to proceed in doing anamorphic transfers: a lot of their new discs(like this one) have beautiful images, but slight flaws. "Enemy Of The State" is probably the best work I've seen from Disney but it's not quite flawless. There are some instances of shimmering, but they're fairly minor. The positives on the disc in terms of image quality are many. There's a lot of shadows in the film and shadow detail is solid and well-defined. Attention in detail in the image in general is very good as well. Colors are vibrant and captured very well, such as the red shirt that Jason Lee's character wears in the first chase scene. Color saturation and contrast are both excellent here as well. Flesh tones are natural and realistic. The image is clear, crisp and razor sharp. Aside from a few small, not terribly distracting flaws, this is a very solid transfer from Disney. It would have been improved if it was anamorphic, but I'm certainly very pleased with the job that was done here and I don't think anyone will be dissapointed with the image quality here. Disney has indicated that they are considering releasing their discs with anamorphic transfers sometime in the future. Hopefully sooner than later, because they are now the last studio not doing anamorphic. Do yourself a favor and do not rent the VHS version of this film. The widescreen 2.35:1 image gives you the full intensity and the beauty of Daniel Mindel's cinematography. There are a lot of very cool lighting tones present in a lot of the scenes and the image handles them perfectly.

SOUND: Solid, with effective detail. During one of the scenes in the restaurant, there was a sound of glasses clinking in the kitchen that was so clear I thought it was in the next room. There are a lot of instances like that on this disc, whose sound mix captures every detail. Surrounds are used effectively during the film's major chase scenes. Especially cool are the presence of the few helicopters in this film, which sound great each time they make an appearance. There's also some solid, deep bass punctuating a lot of the action. I didn't particularly care for Trevor Rabin's score that much, but it sounds fine here, never muddy and always clear and clean. Dialogue sounds fine as well: natural and never compressed. The final scene(I won't give anything away) sounds absolutely incredible.

MENUS: Basic(but enjoyable) film-themed menus that are non-animated.

EXTRAS: Disney has finally begun to add a couple more things to their previous discs, most of which were the definition of "basic". Here, we get two small featurettes(each a few minutes in length) Both are the usual "featurette" offering with interviews with cast/crew. Also included is the trailer for "Enemy Of The State", "Con Air", "The Rock" and "Armageddon". Nothing too terribly impressive, but it's better than nothing.