In 1968 The Thomas Crown Affair was an Oscar winning, financially successful, movie starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. The movie helped to add to the legend of Steve McQueen and featured some explosive on screen chemistry between McQueen and Dunaway. The problem is that The Thomas Crown Affair didn’t really seem like a movie that would benefit from a re-creation later in time. But in 1999 director John McTiernan decided that The Thomas Crown Affair needed to be re-done and his ideas for changes in the basic plot line proved to be a good idea making the remake of the Oscar winning original definitely worth seeing and an award winner in its own right. The Thomas Crown Affair by John McTiernan starred Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in the roles made famous by McQueen and Dunaway but there are changes to the story that made this remake worth seeing. Many movie goers agreed as the movie was a minor financial success and won praise for not only Brosnan and Russon but also for Denis Leary who put on an impressive performance in The Thomas Crown Affair.

The Thomas Crown Affair by John McTiernan is about a successful billionaire who gets everything he wants including women and money. However he soon gets bored from his own success and decides that he will attempt to get things that not even money can buy. He decides to steal priceless works of art. This is a change in the plot from the original movie because in the original version of the movie Steve McQueen played Thomas Crown the self-made millionaire who committed armed robbery of banks because he was bored. John McTiernan decided that movie audiences on the verge of the millennium would not be tolerant of a bored playboy who was committing armed robbery and that having him stealing paintings while unarmed would make the billionaire seem more harmless. The change worked and movie audiences responded to the plot change favorably.

Thomas Crown decides to steal a very expensive painting and soon insurance investigator Catherine Banning, played by Rene Russo, is dispatched by the museum to retrieve the painting. It does not take Banning long to figure out who the thief was but in her quest to do her job she finds herself getting caught up in Crown’s world and Crown himself finds that he is also falling for this beautiful insurance investigator. To make things that much more complicated there is a beautiful blonde that accompanies Crown that we are never quite told any details about until the end of the movie and it definitely makes waves in the blossoming relationship between Crown and Banning. In the end it becomes a twisted love story where it becomes unclear if Banning is going to follow her heart and run off with Crown or do her job and turn him in.

The Thomas Crown Affair was made right when Pierce Brosnan had just become the new James Bond and that suave demeanor that is a trademark of the Bond movies shows up in The Thomas Crown Affair as well. Thomas Crown never orders a martini shaken, not stirred, but he definitely has the super agent lifestyle going on.