The New Cult Canon: 'Sneakers'

“I want peace on Earth and good will towards men.” 

“We are the United States government. We don’t do that sort of thing.” — Sneakers

One of the unique aspects of Robert Redford’s career as a Hollywood movie star is that he so often got to live out his values on screen. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid implicitly rejected the conservative nature of the Western genre, replacing sturdy, masculine John Wayne types with a pair of sympathetic, wisecracking outlaws who are conspicuously modern in their language and attitudes. Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men found Redford reflecting the paranoia of many Americans after the Watergate scandal suggested a lawless, dangerous shadow government. The list continues: Brubaker, a fact-based drama about a warden determined to clean up corruption in the penal system; Incident at Oglala, the documentary he narrated about Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist whose arrest for the murder of two FBI agents was heavily disputed; and The Company You Keep, in which he plays a former Weather Underground member on the lam. And that’s to say nothing of the films he directed, which often pressed the same progressive agenda. 

The ensemble caper Sneakers, featuring Redford as the leader of a merry gang of tech-savvy rogues, was released to polite notices and solid box office in 1992, but its afterlife as a cult favorite has been fascinating to witness. For one, director Phil Alden Robinson, working from a script he co-wrote with WarGames scribes Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes, anticipated the information age with greater prescience that could have been appreciated at the time. The idea of a future “run by little ones and zeroes,” where the power lies more in technology than physical weaponry, seemed more fanciful in 1992 than it would over 30 years later, when the battlefields of wealth and warfare are often virtual. For two, Sneakers now looks like a proto-Ocean’s Eleven, a deft and broadly entertaining heist picture where a couple of wily pros, played here by Redford and Sidney Poitier, lead a quirky assemblage of specialists on an impossible job. There are both satisfying switchroos and lovable misfits worth rooting for. 

Yet there’s a deeper fantasy here that may account for its popularity: Sneakers is about progressives notching a rare victory. It was victory enough for Redford, one of the most handsome stars in Hollywood history, to offer himself as the face (and exquisitely feathered hair) of do-good liberalism. But to see him lead hackers against nefarious forces and win is a rare and particular pleasure for politically like-minded folks, who are mostly resigned to “fighting the good fight,” which is a wordy euphemism for “losing.” What if some collegiate long-hair broke into the Federal Reserve or Richard Nixon’s bank account? Wouldn’t it be great if “the Republican Party just made a generous donation to the Black Panthers?” A beautiful nerd could be the Robin Hood of our times. No swashbuckling skills required.