Most of the plot twists in the 1992 thriller hold up remarkably well, as do its warnings.
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The death of Hollywood legend Robert Redford at 89 invites a cinephile conversation: Which movie featuring the actor and director do you watch to recognize his decades-long career?
Fans of Westerns can start with 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the buddy film with Paul Newman that introduced Redford to the moviegoing public. Journalists will prefer 1976’s All the President’s Men for its portrayal of journalists uncovering President Nixon’s abuses of power in the Watergate scandal.
But you can bet on cybersecurity professionals picking one of Redford’s lesser-known works: Sneakers. The 1992 thriller directed by Phil Alden Robinson stars Redford as Martin Bishop, the leader of a crew of hackers who provide penetration-testing services for clients but find a particularly lucrative contract that gets them into an enormous amount of trouble.
What they thought was a National Security Agency-paid gig to recover a Russian decryption device is actually a plot by Bishop’s collegiate hacking partner Cosmo (played by Ben Kingsley at his scenery-chewing finest) to steal a universal codebreaking machine funded by the NSA, and use it to destabilize the global financial system.
Bishop’s description of the device, code-named Setec Astronomy, an anagram for Too Many Secrets: “It’s the code breaker. No more secrets.”
He and his counterparts—a fantastic ensemble cast of Sidney Poitier, Dan Ackroyd, David Strathairn, River Phoenix, and Mary McDonnell—realize they’ve been played.
