Director: Clark Johnson, 12A, 108min
Stars: Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Eva Longoria, Kim Basinger
On general release
The American secret service, we are informed, has not had a traitor in its ranks in 140-odd years. Well, there’s always a first time. This thriller features a plot to assassinate the US President involving a mole in the ranks of White House security. When veteran agent Pete Garrison (Douglas), who happens to be sleeping with the First Lady (Basinger), is wrongly implicated in the plot, he goes on the run, using his insider skills to save himself and the President (who’s a good guy because he wants to ratify the Kyoto agreement on global warming).
The subsequent cat-and- mouse chase, led by Sutherland as Garrison’s former buddy-turned-foe, is hardly on a par with the gripping adversarial dance that Clint Eastwood and presidential assassin John Malkovich performed in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (1993). For one thing, the script doesn’t provide clear or credible motivation for the assassination plot or the traitor’s involvement in it. The director Johnson simply cranks up the pace to speed through the film’s Air Force One-sized plot holes while offering uninspired shootouts, chases with lots of men and women in wraparound sunglasses and suits, Seven-like montages of nasty-looking, superimposed images, and an irritating electronica score.
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The film descends into repetitive hustle and bustle with marble shots of Washington and granite shots of Douglas. It might have worked better if he’d swapped roles with Sutherland. A bit of Sutherland’s half-cocked
Jack Bauer from 24 would have livened up the supposedly maverick fugitive Garrison, while Douglas’s square-jawed rectitude would have made a better methodical hunter.
But at least they are given things to do: Desperate Housewives star Longoria is simply there to be drooled over. In the end, you’re left thinking that sorting through the dirty laundry in the White House would have been more fun, while a decent episode of 24 would have offered better suspense and action in half the time.