BEFORE: Welcome to the big Spectacular 600th consecutive review! Who would have thought it would have gone on so long? I'd like to thank my enablers, I mean sponsors, Time Warner Cable, Toshiba DVD Recorders, and Pepsi, makers of Diet Mountain Dew ("When you absolutely, positively need to stay up two more hours...")
These anniversary numbers can be tricky, since I need to rely on what I've read or heard about these previously-unseen films, in order to determine which ones are the "important" ones. This one is one of my wife's recommendations, I think...
THE PLOT: The true story of a disillusioned military contractor employee and his drug pusher childhood friend who became walk-in spies for the Soviet Union.
AFTER: Yeah, I got a little bit of bad intel on this one. I thought it would be more about drug-smuggling, and not so much about wanna-be spies. Yes, one of the leads is a drug dealer - Daulton Lee, played by Sean Penn (last seen in "Colors") and there is a lot of action that takes place in Mexico, so back-to-back films set in Latin America is nice. But I was saving a long list of spy films for November. I could easily bump up the spy-film chain to August, but my plans are to follow up with more Sean Penn movies.
The other lead character, Christopher Boyce, is played by Timothy Hutton (last seen in "Q&A") and I have to admit that he's popped up in the last 600 movies more times than I expected - 6 times, which I guess is still only 1 percent of the time.
Again, I have to fault Hollywood for showing me the WHO and the WHAT of a situation, but not really delving too deep into the WHY. Daulton seems motivated by money, that much is pretty clear - but what makes Christopher so keen on giving CIA secrets to his buddy, to peddle to the Russian embassy in Mexico? We get that he's a rebellious sort, and there's some loose metaphor involving falconry (which isn't really much of a metaphor...) - does he really care about foreign governments so much that he wants to keep the CIA from messing with them? Is that enough of a justification to sell secrets to the Soviets, who were our enemies at the time?
It just seems to me that when you find yourself handing over decoded messages and satellite codes, there should probably come a time when you might stop and ask yourself, "Isn't this a form of treason?" It just seems to me to be quite a big leap from "I don't like the way the CIA operates" to "I'll sell secrets to the Russians." I suppose you could cite Watergate as a factor, and the disillusionment that the twenty-somethings of the 1970's felt with regards to their government at the time.
Of course, seeing "Based on a True Story" directed me to the internet to see how close the movie came to the actual facts. I think I also saw these guys profiled on that new TLC show "I Didn't Know I Was Betraying My Country"... Everything seems pretty much in order, and Wikipedia had some updated information - Boyce escaped from a federal penitentiary in 1980, and committed 17 bank robberies in Idaho and Washington. He was arrested again in 1981, and released on parole in 2002. Daulton Lee was released on parole in 1998, and at some point was hired as a personal assistant to Sean Penn.
I've got no time to cast judgments, just to rate films and cross them off the list. It's kind of like when Forrest Gump decided one day to go out for a run, and soon he'd criss-crossed the country several times. One day, 600 days ago, I decided I'd like to watch some movies, and look what happened. And with 380 movies still on my list, and Hollywood still making new ones, the 1,000-film mark is only a year and a month away.
Also starring Pat Hingle, Dorian Harewood, Joyce Van Patten, Lori Singer and Richard Dysart (last seen in "Wall Street")
RATING: 5 out of 10 pigeons
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