***Where The Dough Is-Redux- Pierce Brosnan’s The Thomas Crown Affair

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan, Rene Russo,  1999

Recently in reviewing the original 1968 Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway version of the film under review, The Thomas Crown Affair, I made the following comment:  

“Everybody knows banks, whether in storefronts, in supermarket lobbies, or in marbled edifices, is where the money is. A lot of people also know of the old yegg, Willie Sutton and his famous, or infamous, remark when asked why he robbed banks and noted sardonically that was where the money was. The question posed by the film under review, The Thomas Crown Affair, is why was a guy who has plenty of money (some four million dollars, yes, pocket change today, hardly walking around money, but a substantial amount in 1968) winding up as the prime suspect in a major Boston bank robbery. Strangely enough Thomas Crown’s answer is very much like Brother Sutton’s-that is where the dough is.”

And notwithstanding the change from the bank world to the art museum world that same question can be posed again here-that is where the high-end paintings are. 

Here is the skinny this time. Super-wealthy New York socialite, Thomas Crown (played by the handsome Irish devil Pierce Brosnan) bored/intrigued/into risk-taking on a big scale who plans capers, you know, basically for the sake of doing them. The one that is central to this film is a 100 million dollar Monet theft down at the Met in New York City. On this caper he gets away with it for a while because he hires guys who don’t know each other or him on a contract basis and so he is somewhat immune to being ratted on by snitches and guys turning over on him when the heat is on. Finding out who and what this non-criminal criminal is doing drives the action in this film both for the public and private investigators.       

Naturally the New York cops are clueless about how to handle such a case where it appears that the job was done seamlessly, there was no word on the street about the guy behind the heist and they have to go outside the doughnut shop where they usually hang out to work this one out. Enter one drop-dead sexy sultry female private insurance investigator (played by Rene Russo) who has a serious reputation for  getting the hard cases solved for a serious cut of the recovery money. So Renee (like Faye Dunaway, who has a small role here, in the original)goes to work, gets very close, too close in the end, to this wizard socialite Crown who has a serious case of getting his kicks by high risk actions.

Oh yeah, but wait a minute we have Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in this one, two beautiful people from the 1990s so you know that, well, sex has to show up or this might as well have been a film noir, or something. So sure they ruffle up some sheets, make that plenty of sheets, and Renee gets a little religion about Pierce. So things work out in the end with a little plot twist about where the stolen Monet is located and the happy couple head off into the sunset to share their legitimate dough and bed together.  

The original TCA has a slight edge here in this reviewer’s eyes because there was about eight million degrees more chemistry between those two-just ask Faye.