AUDIENCE APT TO FEEL LIKE VICTIM OF `ENTRAPMENT'.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Daily News Film Critic

``Entrapment'' appeals to the eyes but fails to engage the brain. And with a plot virtually free of nuance, not to mention any genuine suspense, the pleasant visuals and agreeable turns by its leads tend to evaporate after about an hour, leaving you with another hour of implausible goofiness of the highest order still on your hands.

Director Jon Amiel (``Copycat,'' ``Sommersby'') seems to be trying for the same sort of lush breeziness that made Alfred Hitchcock's ``To Catch a Thief'' such a favorite with audiences. But this caper film is handicapped by two insurmountable burdens - a script light on wit and weighted with inexplicable contrivances and a two-generation age gap between its romantic headliners.

``To Catch a Thief'' may be far from Hitchcock's finest, but few flinched at the pairing of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. Here, the cringe factor is high. When Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones finally lock lips (thankfully, it's just for a brief moment), your first inclination is to turn away.

That's not a knock on Connery, who still has charisma to spare (although he uses it sparingly here - think ``The Avengers,'' only not quite as bad). He plays Robert ``Mac'' MacDougal, a legendary master thief suspected of stealing a Rembrandt from a New York office tower. On his trail is insurance investigator Virginia ``Gin'' Baker (Zeta-Jones), who tracks Mac to London and later to his castle in Scotland, a spectacular locale that seems a little showy for a thief trying to hide a lifetime of stolen goods.

Mac and Gin soon form a tense partnership and set their sights on a prized Chinese mask being exhibited at an English art museum. Mac, making like Henry Higgins, puts Gin through her paces in several scenes designed primarily to show off Zeta-Jones' posterior to maximum effect. (Gin's fabric of choice: Lycra.)

Ultimately, the slapdash screenplay (credited to Ron Bass and William Broyles) has the two jetting to Malaysia to attempt a computer heist that's so fundamentally silly and inadequately explained that it completely undercuts the fireworks that follow.

How stupid is it? Mac and Gin have a mere 24 hours to plan for a job that requires them to foil a bank's formidable security team, hack into the elaborate computer system and download $8 billion before anyone is the wiser. (The plan, as Gin explains it, is to steal one-tenth of a second from the bank's computer for every minute of the last hour of the millennium, giving them 10 seconds to shift the money. Never mind that, according to her math, they would only have accumulated six seconds. Nothing else in this movie adds up either.)

Of course, we wouldn't have the time or the inclination to check the story's arithmetic if we weren't bored out of our skulls. A caper movie without tension is like, well, a romantic pairing without sexual chemistry. And ``Entrapment'' fails on both counts.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Entrapment''; (PG-13; violence, language).

The stars: Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Jon Amiel. Screenplay by Ron Bass and William Broyles. Released by 20th Century Fox.

Running time: One hour, 53 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Two stars.

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Photo

Photo: Virginia ``Gin'' Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones) sets a trap to catch legendary master thief Robert ``Mac'' MacDougal (Sean Connery), and the pair later tries to steal $8 billion from a bank in ``Entrapment.''