Someone, somewhere, is making them like they used to. Sneakers, despite its obvious amusement at playing with hi-tech gadgetry, is a highly efficient, neatly made caper movie, with a smile on its face and its heart on its sleeve.

It opens with two college students carrying out a little computer-rearrangement of bank accounts to benefit the Black Panthers, until one is arrested, and the other disappears off the face of the planet. Cut to the present and the man of mystery is Robert Redford, head of a tech-head 'sneakers' business, testing corporate security systems. When the men in suits arrive and offer to wipe his slate clean in exchange for one little job -- the recovery of an experimental code-breaking MacGuffin from its creator -- things start to get interesting, the plot twisting tighter than a vice as Ben Kingsley's Bond-esque soft-spoken uber-villain pops his head up with his own sinister motives behind a high security toy company cover.

This is thriller making in the post-Cold War era. With the Evil Empire eliminated, film-makers have to turn elsewhere for their thrills, and no one is about to pretend for Sneakers anything other than its rather procedural nature. This is essentially a boys-with-toys movie, the ageing Redford joined by an impressive ensemble cast; Dan Ackroyd is conspiracy ago-go, Sidney Poitier the crusty old ex-CIA man. River Phoenix is thrown in as teen interest, Mary McDonnell as the token female, while the redoubtable David Strathairn finally nets a major role as the blind electronics expert. It's made up of building blocks certainly, but it's to the credit of director Robinson and his co-writers that they assemble it all with such style and aplomb, expedited in no small way by some world-class Stedicam from Jim Muro. Thus, we get enough technology to dazzle us to the fact that we're not always entirely sure exactly what it's doing, a blind man driving a getaway truck, and a high-tension heist climax that progresses at two inches a second.

Coming off the back of the enormously successful but cloyingly sentimental and insufferable Field of Dreams, Robinson's work here comes as nothing short of miraculous, aided and abetted as he is by James Horner's fine score featuring jazz great Branford Marsalis. Redford is never afraid to take the piss out of his own self-image, and the cast spark off each other in a pleasingly unselfish manner, all of it underlined with welcome, unashamed liberal politics. That clanking noise in the background might just be the gears of the plot turning, but when it is all constructed with such thinly disguised glee it would be churlish to carp. Art it sure ain't, but Sneakers eschews car chases and gun-play for high-class cerebral popcorn, and as such is near irresistible.