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Review: This is the film that was delayed from release
after the September 11 attacks. And it presents a stereotyped view of
terrorism that is technically slick but so transparent that it seems silly,
in comparison to reality.
Here the
terrorist is a Colombian drug lord – that seems credible enough – and at one
point the terrorist, claiming responsibility, claims that Americans will not
feel safe until the U.S.
is out of Colombia.
This does accidentally echo Osama bin Laden, perhaps. But the real problem of
international terrorism is so much more sinister and complicated that
attempts to reduce it to simple parallels (in a kind of technical plotting
that literary agents usually like to see in thrillers) come out as pointless
exercises in “storytelling.”
Big budget
current-day film-making here breaks down with another problem: phony locales.
I grew up in the DC area and I do not believe that there is a Dulles “State
Department Annex.” (Excuse: “this is a
picture.”) Real Washington
locations (especially Union Station) are presented with self-consciousness
that gets in the way. Independent
film-makers know how to use locations.
Collateral (2004: Dreamworks/Paramount, dir. Michael Mann, R) is a totally
different film with a similar title. Although the premise, slightly
transposed, could work well into a different kind of terrorism. A new cab
driver Max (Jamie Foxx), picks up a rich gentleman Vincent (Tom Cruise –
silver haired and more “ripened” than he was even in Minority Report),
who immediately kidnaps and hijacks him and the cab into an evening of
violence. A corpse falls off the roof of the cab, another is stuffed in the
trunk, and eventually there is a big shoot-out in a disco—a truly harrowing
scene (which is why some discos now check customers for weapons on entry,
just like office buildings). The plot is sandwiched between Jamie’s
encounters with an assistant US Attorney Annie (Jada
Pinkett Smith), and we eventually learn the setup.
Along the way, Mark Ruffalo gives an outstanding
performance as a gayish undercover detective who
almost saves the day before going down to Vincent—who is kind of a reverse
superman—himself.
Artisan Entertainment distributes a DVD of a film made in 2001, The Fourth Angel (dir. John Irvin) with Jeremy
Irons as British Journalist Simon Boyd, who loses most of his family in an
airplane hijacking, apparently by Serbians seeking ransom. After the system
lets him down, Boyd looks to take the law into his own hands, with the help
of a diplomat (Jason Priestley). There are the questions about the motives of
the hijackers (in expositions from the detective played by Forest Whitaker),
which turn out to be so off base after 9/11. Apparently this film did not get
a theatrical release, and it seems way off base compared to what really
happened. Although, I remember on 9/11, while on the team-building
work-related cruise that day, while we had yet to get information, some
people thought that the real hijackings could be related to the Balkans,
before Osama bin Laden came up in conversation. We did not know during that
sunny day what world we could go back to. The film makes August 15 the doom
date, and that was not too far from the mark.
A related film came from Sony Screen Gems in 1999. It is Arlington Road (dir. Mark Pellington),
starring Jeff Bridges, a domestic terrorism (Michael
Faraday) expert and college professor who begins to suspect his neighbor
Oliver Lang (played by Tom Robbins) of sinister intentions. Eventually things
come to fruition when the FBI building on Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington is bombed and collapses (as if
imploded), with results comparable to the real 9-11. But the film has too
many coincidences to be compelling, although it is rather engaging. There is
a lot of discussion over whether terrorists act alone or must be well
organized. And there is a rather disturbing irony at the end of the movie.
Who is the terrorist, anyway, or is this a setup? This particular film seems
surprisingly prophetic of the carnage of 9/11. There is reference to the Oklahoma City bombing
as if it had happened in St. Louis.
Compare to “Civic Duty” (2007,
link below).
Lakeview Terrace (2008, Screen Gems /
Overbrook, dir. Neil LaBute) has a racist African
American cop neighbor taunting a mixed-race couple next door. Blogger.
Another film, Phone Booth (20th Century Fox, 2002), with Colin
Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland and Forest Whitaker, directed by Joel Schumacher,
was held from release in late 2002 after the Malvo-Muhammad
sniper killings in Maryland, D.C. in Virginia. The premise is chilling
enough, and could conceivably inspire copycats. A wiry, hyper, type A and
young public relations executive played by Colin Farrell (who talks in a
definite New York-ese, whatever his Irish
background) gets pinned in a public phone booth at 53rd St and 8th
Ave (12 blocks north of Port Authority Bus Terminal), one day before Verizon
demolishes it, by a sniper. He always calls his girl friend surreptitiously
from it, a little cheating at the corners on his marriage from an otherwise
pretty upstanding guy. Well, the sniper wants to execute him for murky
reasons that have to do with his power to determine which emerging actors to
“publicize.” Well, right away, you wonder about how the whole publicity
machine is supposed to work in the age of an Internet when Google can
publicize anyone. Pretty soon the sniper knocks off a john next to the booth
so that the police will think he is armed. Forest Whitaker looks and acts a
lot like Montgomery County,
Md. Police chief Charles Moose
in the real sniper case. The rest of the movie is an example of lean,
forward-moving screenwriting (the kind that agents like), a story wound up
like Hitchcock’s Rope, in continuous action capped at just 80 minutes.
The main drama consists of Farrell using his quick-thinking (if foul-languaged) wit to communicate to the police that this is
a sniper situation without getting knocked off first. He earns our admiration
for that. (I wish he didn’t smoke.) At the end, he suffers a minor,
deliberate injury and on camera gets the fate deserved by any publicist. His
shirt is stripped off as if he were engaged in break
dancing, and he is revealed, to have no hair on his chest.
Cellular (2004, New Line, dir.
David R. Ellis, 94 min, PG-13) pretty much inverts the premise of Phone
Booth. Here an appealing young actor Ryan (Chris Evans) gets a random
cell phone call and races through the streets of LA (though not in real time)
to save the lady Jessica (Kim Basinger). (He
doesn’t have a hands-free device for his cell phone, but this is a
story! He can race fast cars one
handed, wrong way, over barricades.)
The mood switches from crime thriller when Jessica and her son are
kidnapped, and Jessica locked in the attic, to teeny-bopper rock as Ryan is
chided by his girl friend to, well, help others more and be less selfish.
Well, he gets the random call, and pretty soon we have a movie where you
expect to hear Remy Zero sing “Save Me!”
The plot is tight, with a crisis at every scene (just as in the soaps)
and the story is all visual, yet the film makes some sociological or moral
points with few words and no discourse. That’s what agents like.
I suppose that Chris Evans could compete with Tom Welling
and maybe Josh Hartnett for casting in the next Superman movie. He could be
the one competitor with a hairy chest (at least as is shown in the movies),
which doesn’t work if you have to have the “S” burned on. In fact, Ryan has a
couple of Justin-Timberlake-like tattoos on his shoulders, but that is all.
He carries off the superman-like character with great energy and body
language, without talking too much. You almost expect to see super strength
and heat vision any minute (there is a whimsical visual reference to Xray vision at one point). But the real point is why he
even jumps in. At first, I thought the movie strained credulity at the police
station and then the Wyman private school as it tried to compel Ryan to take
the law into his own hands to save Jessica and commit major felonies (some at
the LA airport security lines) in order to do good. (They reassure us of his
character—when he steals a charger from the cell phone store, he leaves more
money packrat that he has to—an “honest” robber.) Eventually you learn that
there are crooked cops involved (we don’t know for sure where Mooney –
William H. Macy – will come out until the end, given his incompetence in his
first appearance when Ryan tries to get his help at the police station before
going on his own spree).
In fact, Ryan personifies the ultimate of asymmetry. He
does things (like Superman) that only the determined individualist could do.
The police are just too bureaucratic and corruption-prone to handle crooks as
slick as this, but an individual superman can. Like Clark
cum Kal-El in Smallville,
he will determine his own future. Only he can. Oh, he’s a geek, too, with the
cell phones. There is a great comical lawyer character (Rick Hoffman) whose
Porsche Ryan has to carjack—his CA plate reads something like “Su You”, not
“Save Me.”
88 Minutes (2008, Tri-Star / Millennium,
dir. John Avnet, 108 min) is a corker that purports to be in real time but
isn’t – fortunately. A forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino) plays Dr. Death for prosecutors. Shortly before
one of his “victims” (Neal McDonough) is to be executed, he gets a cell phone
call on campus telling him he has 88 minutes to live. The movie becomes a
chase to track down a copycat killer who turns out to be related to the case.
Lots of improbable situations. O.C.’s Benjamin MacKenzie
(Mike Stempt) plays a student and one of the more
likeable characters. No relation to my screenplay “69 Minutes to Titan” referring to the time it takes light to get
to Saturn. There is a real reason for my minute count, none here. Gramm does
tend to make enemies who will pray on unchosen family members, a disturbing idea.
The
Interpreter (2005, Universal/Working
Title, dir. Sydney Pollack, PG-13 128 min) is an ambitious but traditional
large scale political thriller that ties into the post 9/11 world. In fact,
the very last shot of the movie shows lower Manhattan minus the World Trade
Center. The opening scenes are in southern Africa
and set up the story, where a UN interpreter Sylvia Broome (Nicole Kidman),
who grew up in a small African country, overhears an assassination plot to
kill the prime minister (or perhaps dictator) of that country at the UN. A
secret service agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) is assigned to investigate her.
All along, there are questions about her motives. She gets a hold of a used
copy of an old book by the leader, “A Liberator’s Diary.” In the mean time,
the incidents pile up, including a suicide terrorist attack on a NYC MTA bus, when she is in it (she escapes
unharmed). Suicide bombings, common in the Middle East
(esp. Israel)
have not yet happened in the United States.The
media aftermath does not seem to be as melodramatic as it might be. Sydney
Pollack appears in the film (uncredited) as the steady
Jay Pettigrew, the head of the Secret Service detail in NYC,
The
Siege (1998, 20th Century Fox, dir. Edward Zwick, 116 min, R) is one of the most predictive of the
pre 9/11 thriller films about the potentiality of a radical Islam terrorist
attack. In this film there are
multiple small attacks, including kidnapping and blowing up a bus, then
bombing a full Broadway theater (something like this happened in Moscow in
2003) and FBI Headquarters, that eventually lead to martial law being
declared and federal troops being stationed on the streets of NYC. Arabs are called “towelheads”
in the film, and critics (pre 9-11) often noted the stereotyping (recall that
the Oklahoma City
bombing had, however briefly, first been thought to be associated with the Middle East until McVeigh was stopped.) The attacks are
motivated by the secret US capture of a terrorist mullah (echo the first WTC
bombing in 1993). The idea of WMD
attacks is not presented here, as this film is a bit early for that. But I
was living in NYC during the 1975 financial crisis (“Ford to City: Drop
Dead!”), and I wondered if martial law could have resulted from that. Denzel
Washington and Bruce Willis star.
The
Peacemaker (1997, Dreamworks,
dir. Mimi Leder, based on an article by Lesline and Andrew Cockburn) was one of Dreamworks’s first pictures and has LTC Thomas Devoe
(George Clooney) and Dr. Julia Kelly (Nicole Kidman) tracking down loose
Russian nukes, before Chechnyan or Bosnian
terrorists use them. One of them goes off early in the film when two trains
collide (after a switch is deliberately thrown). The actual impact of the
locomotives is not shown. Today, of course, loose nukes is
one of the biggest concerns discussed by Graham Allison and Sam Nunn (“The Last Best Chance”).
Stealth (2005, Columbia, dir. Rob. Cohen) stays in
constant motion with fast moving images and music beat and covers a lot of
political ground in its setup concerning stealth Navy flying wings (the look like the flying wings
of the 1940s, almost like UFOs) controlled by artificial intelligence brains
that resemble HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Of course,
that’s what drives whatever plot there is, the will of the AI machines, who
do not add to unit cohesion, to say the least. But along the way they implode
a high-rise building in Rangoon
after reports that terrorists (aka Al Qaeda) have gathered there; then they
answer Sam Nunn’s appropriate concerns about loose nukes when they go after a
warlord in a fictitious former Soviet republic carrying “Fat Boys” on
livestock. The female pilot Kara (Jessica Biel) gets downed in North Korea,
which sets up a finale where one of the AI’s self destructs for the common
good. Josh Lucas, Jamie Foxx and Sam Shepard also
star.
Red
Eye (2005, Dreamworks, dir. Wes Craven,
85 min, PG-13) is a snappy thriller from a horror that sounds like a more
appropriate release from Dimension films than Dreamworks.
It’s a bit smallish and quick. There is a problem with films that stay inside
an airplane fuselage, which takes about half of this film. The DFW terminal
at the beginning is not accurately depicted (I’ve been there hundreds of
times, including recently). But let’s
get to the subject matter. Irish actor Cillian
Murphy (28 Days Later) is chilling as
the gaunt, unprofiled terrorist Rippner.
(I can imagine a lot of young male actors today incapable of playing a
terrorist, and some are almost personal friends.) The trouble is, you like him too much; getting taken down by him would
be erotic. Not for Lisa (Rachel McAdams) who keeps her cool as Rippner goes to work on her in the next seat on her
flight to Miami.
Now it seems that this in an inside job (getting her to airphone-position
some officials in a Gold Coast South Beach hotel for a bazooka attack from a
cutter called “The Rapture,” and one wonders why the Coast Guard doesn’t
check it out—what it they had a nuke or EMP
device instead to launch? At the time of the filming, cell phones were not
yet allowed on flights. The actual attack is well filmed and quite
spectacular, and appears to be on location. The movie goes for the loyalty to
blood bait, as her father is the mark in a Versachi-like
mansion. The closing climax is a bit predictable.
Flight
Plan (2005, Touchstone, dir. Robert Schwentke)
was released about the same time as Red
Eye by Disney (Buena Vista), looks a bit bigger, is out of the same basic
plot structure, and has been compared to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. Well,
this film really does have an intricate plot with turning points and payoff.
The basic set up is that a female aeronautical engineer Kyle (Jodie Foster)
has lost her husband in a mysterious high rise fall in Leipzig or Berlin, is
flying the body back to New York in a coffin with her six-year-old daughter
when the girl disappears. Vanishes. Evaporates. The crew
try to convince Kyle that the girl never boarded, that she is already
dead. Mental illness. But one thing about airline security is the remote
possibility that the crew, even air marshall (Peter
Sarsgaard) could be in on a plot, and use Middle
Eastern men as a decoy. An inside job. No background investigation can be
perfect.
Face/Off
(1997, Paramount, dir. John Woo, 138 min, R)
sounds at first like an identity-switching story, reminiscent of David
Lynch’s Lost Highway. It’s also a drama
about counter-intelligence against bioterrorism. To infiltrate an cell, Sean Archer (John Travolta) captures a bad guy
Castor (Nicholas Cage) and undergoes creepy surgery to change faces and
appearances. Of course he becomes the other person, of sorts. The two actors
do have similar bodies, it seems.
Broken Arrow
(1996, 20th Century Fox, dir. John Woo, 108 min, PG-13) is famous
for Maj. Deakins (again a hairy John Tavolta) saying, “ain’t it
cool!” Nice guy Capt. Hale (Christian
Slater) must stop him when he turns renegade and
tries to steal two nuclear warheads to blackmail the government. Trouble is,
this does play into Sam Nunn’s arguments about loose nukes (Last Best Chance)
but this time the nukes are at home (the Tooele Depot, perhaps). A related
documentary is “Nuclear Response 911: Broken Arrows & Incidents”.
The
Foreigner 2: Black Dawn (2005, TriStar, dir. Alexander Gruszynski, wr. Martin Wheeler,
105 min, PG-13) gives us a story about the suitcase nukes. Stepehn Segal is the “foreigner” who may be a CIA agent, but he has to work with another agent
in a phony handoff of materials to build a suitcase nuke. The phony crime cell seem to be Russian/American Mafiosi (led by Nicholi – a handsome Nicholas Davidoff) who want to use
nukes to wreck the banking system. This is all to keep them away from another
terror cell. This is a story about who the enemy really is—it is not
necessarily an Islamic sleeper cell, when it could consist of those among us
with some kind of ulterior motives. It’s surprising that this was just for
cable and didn’t find much of a following, because the premise is frightening
and plausible. This could have been a successful theatrical release (or is
the premise just too realistic for so many people to see it?). At the end,
Segal and heroine Agent Amanda Stuart (Tamara Davies) take the nuke out over
the ocean near LA or Long Beach and let it make its mushroom cloud as they
fly away – it still creates an EMP effect and darkens LA (it wouldn’t if
exploded underwater). Most of the literature is concerned with assembling a
conventionally sized nuke (like Hiroshima),
more like a refrigerator than a suitcase. The issue with the possible missing
suitcase nukes from Russia
is that the cores deteriorate and probably would not activate – technical
complications that ought to keep writers like Clive Cussler,
Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn busy thinking. In 2003 this film had a
predecessor, The Foreigner, from
TriStar dir. Oblowitz, with Segal as the rogue
“foreigner” tracking a dangerous package, maybe a WMD. It’s interesting that a fictitious film
called “Black Dawn” is mentioned in the 1954 classic “The Barefoot Contessa.”
The
Sentinel (2006, 20th Century Fox/Regency, dir. Clark
Johnson, novel by Petievich, 105 min, PG-13, Canada). The
Cinemascope move opens strong, with a black-and-white video of the attempted
assassination of Ronald Reagan on March 30m 1981, outside the Washington
Hilton on Connecticut Avenue
in Washington,
by John Warnock Hinckley, Jr. A
character Peter Garrison took a bullet for Reagan then, the story says. Early in this political thriller, President
Ballentine (David Rasche)
demands that the investigation of a possible mole in the Secret Service be
kept classified, because its revelation would cause a total loss of
confidence in the presidency. No kidding. Here, I must reassure the visitor
that this is fiction. Because even though it sounds like a stereotyped idea,
the film is well-crafted and looks more realistic than most. The Washington DC
scenes may be constructed with CGI’s
and matte paintings, but they look real – I live in the area. So do the
climatic scenes at Eaton
Center in Toronto (the center of
DGC filmmaking these days). Secret Service office Pete Garrison (note the
similarity to the last name of the JFK attorney), played by an aggressive,
Wall-Street-gekko-like Michael Douglas, has an
affair with a coworker’s wife and then winds up getting framed for being the
mole. There is a scene where an (apparently) shoulder-fired small missile
takes down Marine 1 near Camp David (which
also looks real in the movie, as do the scenes near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge
and, I think, St. Michaels MD)—the President and First Lady are not in it.
There is a shootout in a shopping mall (it looked a lot like King of Prussia, PA)
that must have taken a lot of legwork to film on location. The denouement has
to do with Kyoto, global warming and globalization (there is an effective
riot scene in Toronto), and maybe some central Asian oil barons, tied to the
Taliban or even Al Qaeda, who don’t want to lose oil revenues; the “solution”
was the weakest link, as it seemed a bit half-baked.
An earlier film of the same name,
(1977, Universal, Michael Winner, novel by Jeffrey Konvitz)
has a fashion model moving into a New York City penthouse and finding it
“haunted,” and occupied by a priest with ulterior motives. This film was a
bit of a hit in the 70s and played big around the major new movie houses in
NYC. The novel was a hit then; today look under his name on BN. The story is
a bit like “Burnt Offerings” and “Dark Water.”
And another TV series by this
name (1996, Paramount, dir. Danny Bilson) has a former special forces officer James Ellison
(Richard Burgi) developing Clark-Kent-like super
senses.
It is usually acceptable for
different books and different movies to have the same name. Sometimes a
series of books, movies, or TV shows becomes a “franchise” and is considered
a trademark or workmark.
Enemy of
the State (1998, Touchstone/Jerry Bruckheimer, dir. Tony Scott,
PG-13, 150 min, wr. David Marconi) is another
thriller about an assassination plot. This time, a suicide is staged of a US
Congressman, the car going into the water (shades of Vince Flynn here). A
labor union lawyer Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith) stumbles onto the plot
when a friend leaves him evidence of the murder, as part of one of his kid’s
presents. Scott gets deeper into this (in staged common in Grisham
thrillers). He is grilled about his own deviations and even “homosexual
thoughts.” There are speeches (especially by Lyle, below) about terrorists
hating our way of life hiding in the country and needed to be identified and
rooted out—one speech sounds chillingly like the Patriot Act talk after 9/11.
The NSA (National Security Agency) houses the bad guys, and the film seems
pertinent in 2006 given the “scandal” about the NSA datamining
private citizen’s phone calls. There is another conversation about the
monitoring at the very end, on Larry King Live. Jon Voight is villain Thomas Reynolds, and Gene Hackman is Billie Lyle, in his he-man gobetween.
There is a subplot about Lyle’s having been in Iran when the
Shah fell and hostages were taken (perhaps a hint that he was involved in the
EDS rescue). Apparently the
congressman was somehow involved in the issue of making or capturing suitcase
nukes. Scott Caan and Jake Busey
are the young undercover cops and are quite convincing when they question
Dean. The movie takes place in the DC area and some locations are effective
(the 12th Street and Dupont Circle tunnels
seem to be used for an important wreck), but Occoquan is in Virginia, not
Maryland; but Kent Island is real and maybe there is important stuff there.
(But it would be vulnerable to hurricanes.) The title of the film seems
“appropriate” personally, given my growing involvement with the Libertarian
Party when the film was made, although the real point of libertarianism is
not to see the world in terms of “enemies.” Unfortunately, too many people
do.
Medium
Cool (1969, Paramount, dir.
Haskell Wexler, 110 min, NC-17) fits on this page, not so much for its
notoriety at the time, but because the story takes up the issue of reporter
immunity (the Judith Miller problem). John Casellis
(Robert Forster) has built his reputation for covering domestic unrest and
riots and learns that his network employers has turned over his work to the
FBI to investigate protestors. Of course, in 1968, the Vietnam era, post Tet, this was a politically unacceptable thing to get
caught doing, but today the issue has meaning in terms of hunting for real
terrorists. Casellis gets fired and perhaps
blackballed, but goes to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and
covers the riots at the conventions. The movies was originally issued with an
“X” (today, NC-17) but has often been shown edited for R.
Chicago 10
(2007, Roadside Attractions / River
Road / Participant, dir. Brett Morgan) recreates
the Chicago 8
trial in rotoscopic animation, interleaved with
compelling actual footage of the Chicago
1968 Democratic Convention riots.
Blogger.
This
Revolution (2005, Screen Media Films / Red Envelope, dir., wr. Stephen Marshall 94 min, PG-13) pays homage to
“Medium Cool” and “this” in the title indeed is like a java keyword. Likeable
20-something iournalist Jake Cassavetes
(Nathan Crooker) has returned from covering the war in Iraq for a big
corporate network, and will cover the Republican Convention in New York in
2004, with attention to the protests. He mixes with activists like Tina
(Rosario Dawson) with a bit of romance. When he tries to cover some masked
protestors assembling on a pigeon-infested tenement roof, he is beaten up,
although somehow his camcorder doesn’t get damaged or taken. He learns that
the activists know that his network is going to turn over the tapes to
Homeland Security, which is using the network as an arm for anti-terrorist
infiltration. Jake has a confrontation with his boss, who admits that he is no
longer a journalist but a corporate mogul who cares only about the bottom
line, and if the government will pay top dollar, he’ll turn over the truth.
Jake, of course, IS a journalist. So he and his friends arrange to overlay
President Bush’s acceptance speech at the convention with a “Pirate Attack”
video of all the suppressed but truthful footage (including atrocities by
Americans in Iraq,
which include an arm amputation on camera), which is broadcast in Times Square.
Sudden
Death (1995, Universal/Signature, dir. Peter Hyams,
110 min, R) has Jean-Claude Van Damme as troubled
former fireman Darren McCord taken on terrorists holding the Vice President
(Raymond Barry) at the “world series” of the National Hockey League Stanley
Cup finals. Darren has, two years before, failed to save a little girl in a
fire. But this is an attack based on ransom, not on ideology. A stereotyped
thriller.
Daylight
(1996, Universal, dir. Rob Cohen) may anticipate a 2006 plot against the
Holland Tunnel by Al Qaeda (later news reports on July 7 contested the early
report that this tunnel was targeted; later reports mention the Path transit
tunnels from New Jersey). In this film, robbers hit a truck filled with
explosives in a Hudson River tunnel, causing
an explosion that collapses both ends of the tunnel. Kit Latura
(Sylvester Stallone) has the job of saving everybody. The initial disaster
sequence is quite well done, but the tunnel is fictitious and looks fake in the movie. There may have been legal reasons for
this. This was a big genre action film at the time.
Patriot
Games (1992, Paramount, dir.
Phillip Noyce, novel by Tom Clancy, adaptation
written by W. Peter Iliff, 117 min, R) is a famous
thriller where Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) gets drawn into a plot while on
vacation. This time the bad guys are the IRA, and his own family back in Maryland is threatened
by a spinoff faction. The idea that rogue elements could target any visible
or important person’s family is disturbing, even though most agents are
supposed to keep a low profile for that reason. The screenwriter who did the
adaptation is now quite well known and teaches at many seminars. This is an
example of a film about an important topic that puts the entertainment value
and constant movement of story first.
Some characters were consolidated in order to make a complicated plot
visually manageable and to keep it moving for the ticket and popcorn buying
audience. Of course, the issues don’t seem as compelling as our problems
today globally, but they are for the players.
Black Sunday (1977, Paramount, dir. John Frankenheimer,
based on a novel by Thomas Harris, 143 min, R) This is the famous movie about
a terrorist plot (launched by Black September) to attack fans at a Super Bowl
in Miami,
with a balloon that will explode and shoot shrapnel. The buildup is
fascinating, with a female terrorist Dahlia (Marhe
Keller) and a disgruntled American Vietnam war veteran Capt. Michael Lander
(Bruce Dern) as the "enemy" and Kobakov (Robert Shaw) as middleman and double agent, and
Fritz Weaver as the FBI Agent Corley.
Time Bomb (2006, CBS/Paramount,
dir. Stephen Gyllenhaal, wr.
Frank Military, 100 min). In this TV movie, a series of bombs is set up in a
football stadium in Washington
for an NFL playoff game. This is similar to a "proposal" recently
announced on some radical websites in early March 2006 (and reported by the
media) as a fantasy to use suicide bombers at sporting events. (There was a
similar hoax reported as news on the NFL website in Oct 2006, which resulted
in a federal prosecution.) David Arquette is the
honcho solving the case and disabling the devices. In an opening sequence a
bar is bombed although everybody gets out. The chief's family has been
kidnapped, playing on "family first" as in "Firewall"
above. ("My wife and kid are here.") There is a great line,
"this is not a discussion." Specific landmarks in the DC area are
deliberately misidentified (Homeland Security is not in the Pentagon, and the
actual name of the stadium (a well known company) is not used, nor is the
name of the football team (which everybody knows). Washington is playing New Orleans, which is back on its feet
after Katrina. It seems like the film studio could not get license rights (to
use real trademarked names and places), or they were afraid of making these
entities targets, a very disturbing observation. The film, as a result, seems
hectic and lacks any sense if reality. The film bears some similarity to
"Black Sunday" above, although it is a bit corny.
Snakes on a Plane (2006, New Line,
dir. David R. Ellis, wr. John Heffernan and
Sebastian Gutierrez, R, 105 min) Well, you can start out with a lot of ho hum
on this one. The lanky candidate Lee who went so far on The Apprentice at age
22 said you don’t get ahead by being a snake. But what about the real
reptiles? Let’s jump to the end credits here, where New Line plays a
sumptuous fern bar video, making fun of the TSA
and security screeners. There is one lesson in practice—they need to look at
the checked baggage, too, for combinations of things. We’ve heard about
bringing on liquids in carry on. Well, the passengers to that in this movie –
even neo-synephrine nasal spray, which is probably
banned. And there is some social commentary, as one little boy is told that
he should prove himself a man by protecting his family – specifically an even
younger brother – an automatic filial responsibility duty that preexists
growing up and begetting your own kids.
There is something claustrophobic
about movies confined to the space of a fuselage – in this case, the plane is
a 747, with a beautiful lounge. FNI agent Nelville
Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) has browbeat artist-surfer Sean Jones (Nathan
Philips), who has witnessed a mob hit in the Big Island
“jungle.” Sean is always a good name for a good-guy character – here, he
doesn’t have enough hair on his arms and legs (he is a surfer) and he goes
along for the ride as a pretty boy. He and Nelville
have first class to themselves, as they return the 2000 miles to LA for Sean
to tesfity. (I made the trip in 1980 when there was
a Braniff; here the fictitious airline is South
Pacific, like the musical.) We find
that out from the screenwriters visually, as all the other passengers get
bumped down to coach on boarding with no published explanation.
Actually, too, the movie is open
at both ends. It opens with a shot of Diamond Head
on Oahu, as if to tell us silently that Honolulu could some day
get it from a tsunami. Toward the end, there is an FBI raid and a landlubber
snake lab. But we have twenty minutes or so of buildup on the plane, while
the snakes in the cargo cabin wake up to the pheromones – that is the
combination chemotherapy in checked baggage that still presents the security
threat. The passengers will get it in the most personal spots – starting with
a couple that has snuck off to the lavatory and turned off the smoke detector
– illegal. Another guy gets it when urinating. People lose the most sensitive
body parts, get eyes gouged out, and have elephantiasis of the legs after the
bites. It becomes mayhem. The way to get rid of the snakes – I hope I don’t
give away too much – is to vacuum them out. Now Sean should have been the
pilot of last resort; instead the Play Station / Microsoft Xbox honors go to Trou (Kenan Thompson). There is
a little bit of homophobic banter with the male flight attendant, who turns
out to be straight – when he almost performs venom removal on a passenger.
You can imagine.
The New York Post online, on Aug. 21, 2006, used the metaphor headline
"Snake on a Plane" to characterize self-confessed JonBenet Ramsey suspect John Mark Karr.
This film has had other titles,
including “Ananconda 3” and “Pacific Air 121”
(which sounds too bland, but New Line, amazingly, almost used it).
Anaconda (1997, Columbia,
dir. Luis Llosa) was a classic horror film in its
day, where a National Geographic hunter goes on a journey to find the world’s
deadliest snake, and many people meet their unseemly demises.
The Art of War (2000, Warner Bros./Morgan Creek/Franchise, dir. Christian Duguay, 117 min, R) stages a terrorist situation that
seemed plausible around Y2K time but is now outdated. Neil Shaw (Wesley
Snipes) prefers elaborate non-violence to negotiate political minefields, but
must resort to self-preservation when he is framed after a Chinese ambassador
is shot at a dinner celebrating a trade agreement, and a truck is found
filled with corpses of Vietnamese refugees. Anne Archer plays a part-Chinese
national bent on exposing how China is a "virus" infecting American
trade while maintaining an essentiallt totalitarian
system. (Remember, in early 2001, there would be a flareup
of nuclear tensions over Taiwan, now forgotten in the 9/11 world.) The film
starts with a spectacular New Years celebration in what looks like Hong Kong. Most of the movie is in New York, with the WTC visible. Donald
Sutherland plays Douglas Thomas as the United Nations PC guy. The film shows
computers with Windows 2000 pretty much as it looked at the time, with the
typical cute GUI applications (like those built with Powerbuilder
and Swing) that today look even more graphical. There is a plot twist
involving a lost cat, and a cat gets involved with a home invasion in one
scene. There is an impressive shot of a seedy garment district sweat shop. A
great line is "Appearances are everything ... Politics and deception are
built on it." A very sharp looking film, even if it has outmoded story
concepts.
Reno 911! Miami (2007, 20th Century
Fox/Paramount/Comedy
Central, dir. Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, 85 min,
R) is a spoof of the Comedy Central TV series, but for me the Saturday Night
Live type humor doesn’t quite come off. In Reno, the sheriff’s department defuses a
potential suitcase nuke attack, and then wins a bus trip to Miami Beach. When the local sheriff’s department
is imprisoned by bioterrorists, the tag team from Reno is called into action, with a series
of dirty skits and jokes. Note: The Miami Beach Sheriff’s Department really
would be the Dade
County department. We
never do see Reno
in the movie, the biggest little city in the world being every bit as
photogenic. Thomas Lennon is Lt. James Dangle, always in the shortest of
shorts, but his gams survive the mayhem. The
funniest scene may occur after the credits (when the audience, which at Regal
included a lot of middle school kids for a gross-out R movie), where the TSA and the security screeners get spoofed, one
being run through the screen. They need Clark
Kent’s
Xray vision, or one of those new devices that
presents a chalk golem image.
The Trigger Effect (1996, Universal /
Gramercy / Amblin, dir. David Koepp, 97 min, R)
This Spielberg associated film is “smallest” and hits the viewer in the gut
with these moral issues about civilization, interdependence, individualism,
and family. It starts with wolves scavenging a carcass outside a major Sacramento, CA
suburb. Pretty soon we see a typical family Matthew (Twin
Peaks ‘s Kyle MacLaughlin, who seems to come right out of that series)
and Elisabeth Shue. In a well-shot scene with the
city in the distance, the power goes out. Over time, no information is
available, and people start becoming very protective of their own business,
families and selves. Matthew cannot buy medicine for his sick baby. Soon,
other conflict with neighbors develop, and Matthew
and his family flee. More conflicts occur in the desert, and at one point
Matthew begs for help from a local resident, who
wonders why he should trust him. The whole script seems to reinvent the
Gospel notions of being one’s neighbor’s keeper, which is difficult in a
competitive society. Now the Northeast had a real blackout in August 2003,
and it did not break down as society does in this movie. At one point, there
is a line about government lists, and yet this movie was made well before
9/11.
True Lies (1994, 20th
Century Fox, dir. James Cameron, based on “La Totale!”
by Claude Zidi et al, 144 min, PG-13). This movie
anticipates the post 9/11 world in that “Crimson Jihad” is led by a character
named Salim (Art Malik)
but whose rhetoric sounds like Osama bin Laden on his tapes (the resentment
of American “occupation” of Muslim lands). He has captured the Snowcake nukes (eg suitcase
nukes), and, as on the “24” program, would blow one up a week until his
demands are met. That part isn’t how it works; in 1994 it wasn’t understood
that Al Qaeda strikes without warning. The setup of the movie sounds clever
but comes across as a spoof of James Bond and, at best, episodic. Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger, not yet governor but maybe
a Republican) works as a computer salesman, following the 100 Mile Rule of
sales culture, and has his wife in the dark about his life as a secret agent
for a secret private company working as a proxy for the government for
corporate America. Mrs. Taske (Jamie Lee Curtis) is
so bored that she gets involved with an amateur sleuth Albert (Tom Gibson).
When Harry catches her in a g-man raid of a trailer park, he disguises
himself and blackmails her into working for the “Shop.” When the terrorist
catches them, they have to reveal their “lies” and work together to prevent
the catastrophe. Many of the individual scenes are clever, but there is no
real tension in today’s terms. It comes across as silly now.
I have a novel manuscript a bit
like this. But in my case the “secret agent” works as a history teacher but
has many absences. His wife knows about the CIA
work as he jets around the world like a “Mr. Wilson” looking for bizarre
clues as to the next end-of-the-world threat. He meets a gay college student
in ROTC, fighting off “don’t ask don’t tell” and needs to use the student to
break the plot. In the course of things, his wife finds out that he is
bisexual himself. I probably shouldn’t give away a plot for free like this
(it helps me to write a short elevator pitch like this on my “pseudo-blog” when
I see an older film like this as comparison), but “the devil is in the
details” and I think there will be plenty of suspense when I have this thing
all edited. It’s more like an “art movie” than a “genre thriller.” There are
intertwined subplots with other characters, including a Muslim who was in the
country for years and has been in the military establishment for years, and
another older gay character who imagines plots that
turn out to guide the gay ROTC student and the “Mr. Wilson” on a tag-team trip
to the “awful truth.” At the end, There Will Be Blood.
Body of Lies (2008, Warner Brothers,
dir. Ridley Scott, novel by David Ignatius, 122 min, R). Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA
agent who sets up a fake terror cell to catch the real one after bombings in London, Amsterdam and Turkey (the
latter against an American military base). Blogger.
Edge of Darkness (2010, Warner Brothers,
dir. Martin Campbell, based on TV miniseries, R) Mel Gibson plays a Boston cop
grieving when his activist daughter becomes a target of a terrorist US
corporation. Blogger. Stuff like vomiting from radiation sickness
goes on.
From Paris with Love (2010, Lions
Gate/Digital Factory/Europa, dir. Pierre Morel, R,
France, 93 min) Geeky Johnathan Rhys-Myers learns to play rough as the CIA
partner of John Travolta, to stop a female suicide bomber at a diplomatic
charity event in Paris. Blogger.
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