This film also gets major demerits for the use of the air shaft. I mean: the air shaft. The air shaft, people. Is Brian De Palma in third grade?
Entrapment. Don’t get me wrong, Sean Connery is a classy bad guy, and Catherine Zeta-Jones is an elegant and fascinating thief with smooth moves, but you know the big scene with the lasers around which Z-J does her sexy thief yoga? If you were the retention strategist on that one, would you honestly make the laser pattern just irregular enough for a swimsuit model to cha-cha around? Or would you simply make an impenetrable network of evenly placed lasers at six-inch intervals? Is that such a toughie?
Once again, a single pulse in a chair and Z-J is doing downward dogs on Rikers.
Ocean’s Eleven. I feel bad about debunking this one. The movie is so much fun. And suspenseful. There’s nothing more terrifying to a pulse than thieves making off with a MacGuffin and taunting the client while they do it. However, in the case of Clooney and Pitt et al., it is also ridiculous. Naturally they do a slick job of bypassing the safeguards and getting into the vault. But then they “loop the tape”—again, here I must suppress a guffaw—and engineer a clever way out dressed as SWAT guys. Smart, but—can you feel it coming?—even if they blew the power to the entire state of Nevada they would have been snagged by a pulse in the vault armed with a child’s bicycle bell.
Brrring brrring! You’re busted.
While I’m at it, let me dispel some other security myths. The first thing is air shafts. Let’s just get this one out of the way. No facility on earth that is serious about MacGuffin containment has air shafts big enough to crawl through. They have a series of smaller ones, vulnerable to nothing larger than a specially trained ball python,4 so unless you’re pulsing a really crappy site (such as the one I’m at tonight) you don’t have to sweat the air shaft.
Trained dogs cannot be bypassed by throwing steaks at them. Some guy did this to my late, beloved Pinkerton and he got an assful of teeth.5
You can’t fool a pulse by showing up dressed in the same uni and pretending to be a last-minute replacement for a colleague who called in sick. It’s just ridiculous. There’s a strict protocol for call-ins and every pulse at Janus knows each other. We aren’t interchangeable. The second we see an unfamiliar face on-site it’s button time.
It’s hard to cudgel someone and not kill them or cause serious brain damage.
Only stoolies do predictable, thief-friendly rounds. Pulses don’t break sight line with their MacGuffin unless they’re on a rare Evac Recess, in which case they get covered by a floater. When necessary to do a round—or if you’re overstaffed on a particular gig—you bob and weave, and you never follow a sked.
And I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this so publicly, but: it’s never the green wire. It just isn’t. Maybe it’s the red, maybe it’s the black, maybe it’s the yellow. It could very easily be the chartreuse wire with magnolia piping and purple doilyesque filigree, but it’s never green. Every time some bluethumb tries to cut the green wire to bypass the system it ends up in one quick arrest.