Thomas Crown: [smirking] I trust myself implicitly.
The Psychiatrist: But can other people trust you?
Thomas Crown: Oh, you mean society at large?
The Psychiatrist: I mean women, Mr. Crown.
Thomas Crown: Yes, a woman could trust me.
The Psychiatrist: Good. Under what extraordinary circumstances would you allow that to happen?
Thomas Crown: A woman could trust me as long as her interests didn't run too contrary to my own.
The Psychiatrist: And society? If ITS interests should run counter to your own?

Not unlike its titular billionare, there's something so charming and disarming about the Thomas Crown Affair's incredibly modest, breezy, I-can't-believe-this-isnt-a-TV-movie sensibilities. There is nothing you'll be surprised by in this film: Pierce Brosnan plays a rakish billionaire, and Rene Russo plays a fiery art sleuth trying to track him down, and from that description alone you already know everything there is to know.

It's neither a complicated nor substantial film, and your acceptance of its wispiness is largely predicated on whether you're watching this because you have 90 minutes to kill or if you're watching this because you want to see something good.

There are a couple fun choices in the film: one is the framing device of Faye Dunaway as the psychiatrist, which seems completely immaterial to the plot and doesn't even give us any information about Brosnan's character, but is a nice little wink to the original film. Another is a very deliberate focus on eschewing technology in favor of more timeless methods of heisting, and I think that does this film a favor in much the opposite direction that most of Brosnan's Bond films feel dated purely because the folks behind the camera lacked the self-control to mess with gadgets.

But if the movie is defined by its suave vacuity, there are just so many better options that I struggle to recommend it to anyone who's already drowning in things they've been meaning to watch. It is an unfair bar to compare this to Ocean's Eleven (also a remake!); this is a quieter, stiller movie, and one that's more interested in the romance than the heist. (But there is more beauty and truth in one little exchange in Ocen's Eleven — "does he make you laugh?"; "he doesn't make me cry." — than in all of Russo and Brosnan's smoldering banter.)

★★