Directed by Richard Donner
Running time 140 mins
Certificate 15
I bet this is exactly how the braindead producers responsible for this piece of cinematic offal sold it to the studio. Yeah, Taxi Driver meets The Pelican Brief, with a dash of Twelve Monkeys, and we can get Mel Gibson in, he can sell anything, and Julia Roberts, because she's cheap these days. And we need a sinister guy. Let's make him bald, because then he'd be really sinister. Oh! Oh! I know! Patrick Stewart! Then all the Trekkies will come along! That's got to be worth millions!
Y'see, this is probably the idlest film I have seen this year. It is devoid of ideas, innovation, wit and pacing. Words almost fail me as to what a blatant attempt to steal your money this is.
Mel Gibson plays a New York cabby. No, scratch that, Mel Gibson plays Travis Bickle. He's this psycho taxi driver, with a bunch of political obsessions and a fixation upon a woman in authority. He babbles to himself, causes a fuss at her office and convinces himself that she really cares for him, and that they have a future. Only problem is, rather than being a fascinating, poignant and ultimately disturbing figure, Gibson has been made into a hero. Which kind of misses the point, somewhat. It turns out that he is just an innocent victim, corrupted by the US government's MK/ULTRA programme and twisted into being a perfect assassin. Am I giving the plot away? Damn straight. I'm trying to discourage you from seeing this film. Anyway, even if you do go, you'll have worked that bit out in the first half hour anyway, even though the "big revelation" isn't made for another hour. The only people that won't get it probably find it a great surprise that Pinocchio becomes a real boy in the end.
Now, don't get me wrong. I think Mel Gibson was a fine actor, once. That once was a long time ago, when he was still making low-budget Australian films like Tim. That he can go from one of the finest dramatic portrayals of the mentally disturbed to this insulting hogwash in a single career is a point of astonishment to me. Here he flips between the roaring fits he occasionally suffered in the Lethal Weapon movies and what appears to be a bad imitation of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Throw in some slapstick scenes (I don't know what they're doing there either) and we have a perfect model for the movie: a needlessly up-tempo rehash of some much better movies.
Gibson has been dragged down to this level by Hollywood. Julia Roberts, however, has always been talentless, relying on a combined pout and head twist to divert the audience from lynching her. She pops up as the object of his affection: but rather than turning in a performance of the caliber of that provided by Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, she just rehashes her Pelican Brief role, as innocent and fairly junior young lawyer that gets accidentally drawn into an all-pervasive plot that she does not fully understand until the closing scenes. All the time, she shows an almost Scully-esque ability to ignore the blindingly obvious. "I've just been shot at with rifle grenades, I'm being followed by silent black helicopters and everyone I talk to about it ends up dead. You don't think ... naw, it's all someone else's imagination."
As for what Patrick Stewart was doing here, I have no idea. As the chief bad guy, he wins the award for most uncomfortable and out-of-place performance by a talented actor in a dumb action movie, an award that Steven Berkoff has held since 1985 for his slavering KGB agent in Rambo. The only possible explanation is that he's planning on retiring soon and wants to make the last few payments on that Malibu beach house.
But it's not merely the acting that's idle here. The only fun to be had visually is by guessing which film is being ripped off stylistically at any one point in time. Taxi Driver is raped mercilessly for the first half hour, but then so is the dentist sequence from Marathon Man and the rolling, rumbling paranoia from the sanatorium sequences of 12 Monkeys
This is all made worse by the simple fact that the script writers, apart from being incapable of writing good dialogue, developing consistent characters or keeping to the plot (you're being chased by a death squad! you don't start discussing your relationship or looking at the decor! you just run!) obviously have no understanding of conspiracy politics. First of all, there are no left-wing conspiracy theorists left, because to be a conspiracy theorist, you have to be a marginal political element, suggesting an alternative view of the world to that most commonly held. Did you miss Contragate, guys? These days, everybody thinks the world is run by a bunch of evil corporations: that's the political status quo. The only remaining conspiracy theorists are ultra-rightwingers called Bubba, living in compounds in Idaho and ranting about UN tank parks under Colorado. If Mel Gibson's character had gone to any established newspaper, claiming that NASA was using earthquakes to assassinate world leaders, they would have pointed him to last week's editorial on the congressional sub-committee hearing on that very issue.
Mind you, hoping for them to understand their subject matter would be a bit of a long stretch. After all, they're still taking the beginner's lessons in script coherence. Particular attention must be drawn to the least intelligible incident of plot realization by a leading character since Tom Cruise's "wait! but only one person I know has a bible! he must be the bad guy!" moment in Mission Impossible. Mel's loon works out that another character has been imprisoned falsely: his logic? The guy has three names. Y'see, all assassins are always referred to by three names, like John Wilkes Boothe, while serial killers only have two names, such as Ted Bundy. Obvious, isn't it? However, he makes his weak argument even more tenuous by mentioning Mark Chapman (the guy who killed John Lennon), who I never knew had a middle name, and failing to mention notorious serial killer and three-namer John Wayne Gacey. Add those into the mix, it all starts to fall apart a bit, doesn't it?
This all got past the script editors. I dread to think what they managed to extract in time.
But where this film goes most awry is in its depiction of how conspiracies are run. A few simple rules: conspirators do not drop vast squads of plain-clothes agents, bristling with guns, in the middle of a crowded street. They do not send wetworks agents in with grenade launchers. They definitely do not explain their plans: you are now confusing Blofeld with G. Gordon Liddy. Easily done, they're both bald.
However, this over-riding premise of subtlety and deniability is all particularly true when it comes to MK/ULTRA. The entire project was based around a premise of untraceability: that your agent had no idea that they had ever been involved in a government project or that they were assassins. MK/ULTRA operatives were one-shot, utterly disposable and totally untraceable. So suggesting that Mel Gibson's character would be hunted by the secret service because he knew the details of the project smacks of terrible research. This may seem like petty quibbling, but you're the ones who dragged a real and well- recorded project into your movie, not me. But then again, it would have been against your credo to actually come up with a project name all of your own, right?
This film thinks it's clever, which is the worst crime it makes. It even dares to insert a cinematic joke, a sign of hideous pretension in the wrong hands. When Mel Gibson hides in a cinema from the bad guys, (like Oswald. Real clever, guys) the movie showing is Ladyhawke, which Richard Donner directed. Oh, how we laughed. Of course, we might have laughed more if the rest of the film had been any cop, but that's too much to ask for. I don't even know who has more to be insulted by in the movie: the criminally insane, victims of government plots or the secret government that really runs the planet. After all, they may be evil and manipulative, but they're not this sloppy.
RMW