A film with James Woods, John Travolta, Madelaine Stowe, Timothy Hutton and James (how is Babe?) Cromwell could not be missed. And I won't miss it, having seen it -- as in, I'll dash off this review and try to forget it.
I won't criticize it for being unabashedly formulaic -- which it is -- because, well, innovative and creative films are few and far between anyway. But, sheesh!, the first third had way too many obviously portentous scenes -- we're bludgeoned with them. There's heavy innuendo whenever anyone speaks, hammed up with the kind of facial expressions so characteristic of overacting. Further, the behaviour of the army characters was confusingly erratic -- sometimes too stereotypically puffed-up to be believed, sometimes informal enough to demand a courts-martial.
Things picked up after about thirty minutes and an interesting plot seemed to be unfolding, notwithstanding a totally pointless distracting sideline -- a hokey, done-a-thousand-times-better bit of turf-war animosity between a civilian cop and the swaggering military investigator (Travolta). The depiction of the crime scene, however, was offensive. Panning repeatedly on the woman's nude body, lingering grisly images over and over in the rape scene, complete with graphic descriptions of how it felt -- all of this was gratuitous to the point of pornography. This carried through to the end of the film (snuff porn fanciers, God help them, will be quite gratified, at least).
Compared with the gruesome murder scenes in, say, "Seven", which horrify by presenting brief glimpses and letting the imagination do the rest, these scenes are drawn-out and heavy-handed. The murder scenes in "Seven" left me queasy about the psychopath; those in this film leave me worried about the film director. If nothing else, that's a distraction.
If you're the sort of film-goer who likes to sleep through most of the movie and have everything explained by monologues at the end, this is your kind of film. Leaving nothing unsaid, the last half hour is full of exactly the sort of confessions of the soul that do not ever happen in real life. People with no compelling reason to expose their career-threatening secrets -- people who have spent seven years concealing them in a cold, calculated and rigid conspiracy -- crumble one at a time before two underling investigators with little to go on other than hunches and the occasional totally illegal and improbable beating of a witness.
Not content to treat us as severely lacking in imagination, the filmmakers felt a further need to tell us in a written postscript that the bad guy got his just deserts and that there are lots of women in the armed forces who are going to do just fine. What's the point? That despite this gang rape the military is a cool place for women? There must be a point; this film can't resist making points.
My point is, this cast is full of people who can act. I hope each of them finds a film worthy of talented actors and actresses next time.
My rating is five out of ten, including one point each for the two very funny one-liners. Spend your money on something worthwhile and entertaining, like "Besieged".
I won't criticize it for being unabashedly formulaic -- which it is -- because, well, innovative and creative films are few and far between anyway. But, sheesh!, the first third had way too many obviously portentous scenes -- we're bludgeoned with them. There's heavy innuendo whenever anyone speaks, hammed up with the kind of facial expressions so characteristic of overacting. Further, the behaviour of the army characters was confusingly erratic -- sometimes too stereotypically puffed-up to be believed, sometimes informal enough to demand a courts-martial.
Things picked up after about thirty minutes and an interesting plot seemed to be unfolding, notwithstanding a totally pointless distracting sideline -- a hokey, done-a-thousand-times-better bit of turf-war animosity between a civilian cop and the swaggering military investigator (Travolta). The depiction of the crime scene, however, was offensive. Panning repeatedly on the woman's nude body, lingering grisly images over and over in the rape scene, complete with graphic descriptions of how it felt -- all of this was gratuitous to the point of pornography. This carried through to the end of the film (snuff porn fanciers, God help them, will be quite gratified, at least).
Compared with the gruesome murder scenes in, say, "Seven", which horrify by presenting brief glimpses and letting the imagination do the rest, these scenes are drawn-out and heavy-handed. The murder scenes in "Seven" left me queasy about the psychopath; those in this film leave me worried about the film director. If nothing else, that's a distraction.
If you're the sort of film-goer who likes to sleep through most of the movie and have everything explained by monologues at the end, this is your kind of film. Leaving nothing unsaid, the last half hour is full of exactly the sort of confessions of the soul that do not ever happen in real life. People with no compelling reason to expose their career-threatening secrets -- people who have spent seven years concealing them in a cold, calculated and rigid conspiracy -- crumble one at a time before two underling investigators with little to go on other than hunches and the occasional totally illegal and improbable beating of a witness.
Not content to treat us as severely lacking in imagination, the filmmakers felt a further need to tell us in a written postscript that the bad guy got his just deserts and that there are lots of women in the armed forces who are going to do just fine. What's the point? That despite this gang rape the military is a cool place for women? There must be a point; this film can't resist making points.
My point is, this cast is full of people who can act. I hope each of them finds a film worthy of talented actors and actresses next time.
My rating is five out of ten, including one point each for the two very funny one-liners. Spend your money on something worthwhile and entertaining, like "Besieged".