August 10, 1999 -- "The Thomas Crown Affair" is a great movie to look at and to listen to, but it really doesn't have anything going on under the surface. It suffers from an intellectual and emotional vacuum.

The film stars Pierce Brosnan (the latest model of James Bond) and Rene Russo ("Ransom"). Both are in their mid-40s, but don't look, or act, like it in this film. There's a law against aging in Hollywood. Brosnan is the cool, calculating master financier Thomas Crown and Russo the determined insurance agent, Catherine Banning.

Banning jets into town to investigate the theft of a valuable painting from a museum, a theft masterminded by Crown. While the police, led by the wry Michael McCann (Denis Leary), bark up the wrong tree, Russo tries to get her man the old fashioned way, with feminine wiles.

Banning and Crown become romantically involved, or perhaps a more accurate phrase is sexually involved, since it seems more like lust than romance. It turns out Banning is even more unscrupulous than Crown as she commits an act of breaking and entering to get something rom Crown.

Crown doesn't mind a bit. The two jet off to Rio for some fun and games, including a scene which sums up the movie pretty well. The two sit, drunk, laughing while they destroy a valuable work of art for no discernible reason. Down below, in the squalor of the Rio slums, the money squandered would have meant life itself for hundreds, if not thousands of people. To me, that particular scene exemplifies the phrase the ugly Americans. The one character who does appear to be decent is Detective McCann (Leary). He gives the film a reference point of reality and morality. Leary gives his best performance in years. Faye Dunaway, who also appeared in the original, 1968 film, appears as a psychiatrist, sort of a mother confessor, in this film. It is nice to see her again, but the character doesn't add much to the film.

This is a story of two people who are both wealthy and beautiful. They have everything, and are bored by it. In essence, they are rich, spoiled children, and that is just how they act. As such, their romance is quite unbelievable. They appear to be far too self-centered to love anyone. The final, whispered words in the movie seem to prove that. They are not words of love, or sweet nothings, for that matter.

The movie does have some plusses. The photography and the sets are sumptuous. The colors in the film are lush and vibrant. The soundtrack is rich and varied with a nice version of "Windmills of Your Mind," from the original film to a catchy Latin number and even a gospel number, "Sinner Man." Brosnan and Russo are, of course, very attractive people and we get to see just about all of them in various nude scenes. That, however, does not fill the emptiness at the center of this film, an emptiness that was also at the heart of the original film, but without the edge of the original film. This film rates a C.

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