Web posted on:
Thursday, April 29, 1999 12:33:54 PM EST

By Reviewer Paul Clinton

(CNN) -- Sean Connery stars as Robert "Mac" MacDougal, the world's greatest art thief.

Catherine Zeta-Jones plays Virginia "Gin" Baker, an insurance investigator hot on MacDougal's tail after a $24 million Rembrandt disappears during a bold robbery in New York City.

The stage now is set for plenty of action and adventure.

Unfortunately if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the movie.

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"Entrapment," produced by Connery's own Fountainbridge Films, is one of those movies. It's slick and fast-paced, with plenty of pulsating music and lots of loving shots of Zeta-Jones in skin-tight outfits. Jon Amiel -- who also directed the 1995 thriller "Copycat" with Sigourney Weaver and Dermot Mulroney -- makes this film clip along at 100 miles per hour. And it goes absolutely nowhere.

The first half of the movie flips back and forth, with Zeta-Jones' character operating as a law-abiding investigator, then revealing herself as a fellow art thief -- and then reverting to her investigative mode. Golly, is she or isn't she? This is all supposed to be intriguing and keep us wondering. Guess what? Doesn't work. By the time the plot settles down and you find out for sure whose side she's on -- it no longer matters.

Ving Rhames hovers around, playing a guy named Thibadeaux. Not only is his name practically unpronounceable, but he's also meant to be some mysterious character involved somehow with Mac -- or is he? All we know for certain is that he comes and goes and adds nothing to the film.

The second half of this amusement ride billed as a movie involves a heist cooked up by Mac and Gin. It's all set to take place on the stroke of midnight, New Year's Eve, at the dawn of the year 2000. They're planning to steal billions of dollars via computer. The whole deal is based on the paranoia over the Y2K bug at a huge international bank in Malaysia. OK, if nothing else, the plot -- and I use the term loosely -- is timely.

"Entrapment" is beautifully wrapped, but it's a package with nothing inside. The screenplay was written by Academy Award-winning writer Ronald Bass. He won his 1988 Oscar for his work on the film "Rain Man," but he also provided the gooey script for one of the worst films of last year, "What Dreams May Come." Now we have "Entrapment" -- Bass must have been wearing mittens while typing this one.

The studio production notes for "Entrapment" say it has a character-driven plot. That may be. But no one seems to have had a map -- nor was anyone watching where things were going.

That said, this flick is a whirlwind of "Mission Impossible"-type gadgets and doodads, with a seemingly never-ending series of twists, turns, and totally improbable situations. Zeta-Jones and Connery both look great, and there are plenty of eye-popping special effects.

But ultimately, it all adds up to a big, fat "Who cares?"

"Entrapment" is rated PG-13 with a running time of 112 minutes.