Jake Busey Dazzles Audiences As "Krug"

Review

By El Snatcher
Editor

The latest Jake Busey vehicle, Enemy of The State, is a creepy, paranoid thriller focusing on the shadowy world of satellite surveillance, communications monitoring, and secret intelligence agencies. Jake Busy is "Krug," the perfect "Black Ops" thug--an NSA operative, and former marine, who spent some time in the stockade for assault on a superior officer.

The NSA will stop at nothing, even murder, to get total information. When a hapless labor lawyer, Robert Dean (Will Smith), stumbles into a plot to ensure the passage of a new privacy bill (read: no privacy), he becomes the target of a nefarious NSA operation to track him, extract a damaging video tape in his possession, and kill him if necessary. That's where Krug (Jake Busey) comes in. Krug is like an unstoppable machine. As long as his handlers are able to feed him data on the movements of Dean; ominously provided by keyhole spy satellites; telephone monitoring; black helicopters; and microwave tracking devices planted in Dean's clothes, watch, cell phone, pen, and pager; Krug relentlessly plows through locks, doors, traffic, and anything else that gets in his way.

The Gen-X computer geeks who work all the hitech gadgetry stay behind the scenes while Busey does the dirty work. "You can tell [he's "Ops"] by the haircut," one geek analyst quips. Unlike the weakling and fatty geeks who handle the information, Krug is the active element. Wisely, the NSA supplies Krug with a bitchin', red 1978 Camero instead of the usual Crown Victoria, Caprice Classic, or Suburban that government agents usually have to drive. He doesn't know how to work the computers, but Krug thinks on his feet. The only thing that stands in between Krug and Dean, Krug's target, is Dean's ally Brill, a former NSA communications analyst himself, played by Gene Hackman, reprising his role in The Conversation, who manages to foul up the NSA's intelligence gathering systems.

But Krug is no "Terminator" who arbitrarily snuffs people. He frequently shows a phony police badge for no other reason than to assure innocents that everything is going to be okay. After he breaks into a Chinese tourist couple's room, while chasing after Dean, he goes out of his way to comfort them. After all, he's only following orders. He's very good at killing people, but he only kills for one reason--national security.

Loyal to his NSA handlers to the very end, Krug goes out in a bloody blaze of gunfire when he pulls out a Heckler and Kotch MP-5 assault rifle in an attempt to disarm a mob boss and his henchmen who have mistakenly stumbled into the operation.

This is one of Busey's most thought-provoking films to date. It gives us a glimpse inside the information infrastructure of the three-letter agencies, and their invasive spy capabilities over the activities of ordinary citizens.