In the spot of bother
I started watching this movie with a natural excitement one has while watching Clint Eastwood’s works. He has been one of the fool proof directors/actors for me. But the same couldn’t be said about this movie. Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, who set the bar really high, at least according to me, in ‘Das Boot’, fails to weave the same magic here. Though critically acclaimed, the movie didn’t fit in either a fast-paced fun action movie like a ‘True Lies’ or a really serious thriller like a ‘A Day of the Jackal’. It was in between and in a spot of bother.
The movie has more scope for the villain, Leary (John Malkovich) than for the hero Horrigan (Clint Eastwood). I guess it’s the one of the movies where catching up with the age genre went wrong. He had to play an unglamorous role of an aging secret service agent with no heroism, who pants while running along the car of president, sweats with tension while protecting him and struggles to run while chasing a thief. His instincts are no more the same. He’s too old to flirt and only his guts guard him in an otherwise tiring environment.
The man whom he’s up against him is an assassin who’s on a rampage. A near psycho who is on a killing spree so that he can have importance. Horrigan, who’s marred with guilt of not being able to save Lincoln the first time over provides to be a perfect bait for Leary’s folly. There is a cat and mouse game throughout with a little flirting between Horrigan and Lilly Raines (Rene Russo) who even though aged than a typical female counterpart looks lovely. She doesn’t overdo in any scene.
The love making scene where they had to remove their dress, walkie talkie, guns etc. to get to bed was a lovely scene. But the sense of irritation one must have got while returning back to work on hearing a call was missing when Lilly gets out of the bed. Plus, the scene gets literal when Horrigan utters a dialogue of how it’s a tiresome act to wear everything again. It’s not the only scene which was literal. There were a number of scenes which would have been great if had been left as such but Horrigan’s dialogues spoil the impact. Wonder how Wolfgang Peterson resorted to such screenplay, because ‘Das Boot’ was all about close ups and expressions, here it was completely opposite. May be that’s the disadvantage of making a movie different from one’s native language.
The movie has a great poster with Clint Eastwood running along the president’s car. What looked like a heroic chase or at least a heroic poster gets a completely different meaning while watching the movie. The villain too was given a good weightage in the script but he couldn’t exude the charisma like a Hannibal Lecture. Looks as if it’s toned down to make the Eastwood prominent. Whether it happened intentionally or not, it did spoil the impact. We don’t feel Horrigan to be as helpless as how Batman feels around Joker. That’s the power of building a powerful antagonist, the revenge will be sweet but it feels like a typical Rajni movie where he says ‘vayasayirucha enaka?’ (aged, am i?). That’s why I compared it with ‘True Lies’ where at least Arnold goes on a full rampage from a family man to Rambo.
Leary was supposed to be done by Robert De Niro, but couldn’t do it because of ‘A Bronx Tale’, which in a way is good because ‘A Bronx Tale’ is one of my all-time favorite movies and co incidentally it’s my second reference of ‘A Bronx Tale’ in this week. But maybe if De Niro had done, he’d have added more dimension to the character, like how Jack Nicholson did in ‘The Departed’ even though the story majorly revolved around the rats.
constantscribbles 