Lunatic Enterprise

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: SNEAKERS

DIRECTOR: PHIL ALDEN ROBINSON

WRITERS: PHIL ALDEN ROBINSON, LAWRENCE LASKER AND WALTER F. PARKES

THE BOTTOM LINE: American dreamers find a funny new field to invade.

ALL RIGHT, THERE'S THIS LITTLE black box full of mysterious and potent electronics that all kinds of people, good, bad and ambiguous, want to possess. The prize is merely the key to the universe -- or anyway that portion of it that is computer-driven. The box can decipher any security code and permit anyone, hacker or master criminal, a free, personally enriching, socially destructive play in this great new field of dreams.

We all know that this kind of premise usually sets up movies for which audiences ought to be issued batting helmets -- nothing but high hard ones whizzing at us. But writer and director Phil Alden Robinson, the auteur of every grownup American boy's sentimental favorite, Field of Dreams, is pitching smart in his latest start: knucklers and sliders, and maybe the occasional spitter. The result is sweet bemusement.

The home team in this movie has the shambling air of good-natured, slightly out-of-it sandlotters. Bishop (a well-cast Robert Redford) is a sometime merry prankster, still on the run for computer crimes he committed in the '60s; he now heads a marginal enterprise that does legalized breaking and entering designed to test corporate security systems. His associates include a defrocked cia operative (Sidney Poitier); a gentle paranoid (Dan Aykroyd) who believes the same group that killed Jack Kennedy also framed Pete Rose; a blind computer whiz (David Strathairn) whose keyboard -- and Playboy -- are in Braille; and a kid (River Phoenix) who demonstrated his personal best when he illegally improved his grades in a raid on his school's mainframe.

It may be better not to regard this crew as a team at all, but rather as an ensemble of excellent actors on a goofy, lively lark. Sure, they gain and lose their elusive electronic grail the requisite number of times, often surprisingly. Their larger obligation, however, is not to the implausible plot but to their funky characters, and to the nice, wistful mood of the film. They all share a nostalgia for '60s idealism; even their nemesis (Ben Kingsley) operates out of a dark variant on those quixotic beliefs.

But the great thing about them is that they all have an observant intelligence: they can see how lunatic their enterprise is, how silly they must look pursuing it and how refreshing it is sometimes just to drift away into fantasy. You might call them the gang that couldn't think straight. You might also reflect, in these grim, get-to-the-point times, that this is their strength, and the strength of this endearing movie. God, they say, is in the details. But fun, and the source of our best inspirations, is in the details that at first look irrelevant.