BEFORE: So many ways I could have followed up "White House Down" - "Olympus Has Fallen" would have been the obvious choice, but "22 Jump Street" (Channing Tatum plays a cop) could have worked too. Or Jamie Foxx could have carried over into "Horrible Bosses 2", or Jason Clarke could have carried over into "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes" - certain films are like actor-linking nexuses, and I can go in almost any direction from them. But then I have to think about films like this one, that don't have as many linking opportunities, at least not on my watchlist, so I'm sticking with James Woods, who was in tonight's film 32 years before he was in "White House Down".
AFTER: This was a weird one for me, I'm not sure if the pieces all came together right - for that matter, I'm not sure I know what most of the pieces even look like. I don't think the film is even named properly, because the janitor in question wasn't even an eyewitness, he was in the building when a Vietnamese banker was murdered, but that hardly makes him an eyewitness.
Sure, he claims to know something, and he may even think he knows who did it, but look at the definition of "eyewitness", please. Did he see it happen, with his own eye? Hardly. It seems more like he's just pretending to know something so he can form a connection with a pretty reporter - who's seen on TV reviewing a play, so what the heck even puts her on the crime beat? Jeez, at least Clint Eastwood's reporter character in "True Crime" was a little more believable writing about crimes - but, ironically, he was sent to Death Row to write a human interest story, so go figure.
There's so much unclear here - and nearly every plot synopsis I've found doesn't even get it quite right. But it relies on coincidence so much, that viewers might get the feeling that there are only 10 or 20 people living in the borough of Manhattan? Plus there's a subplot about soliciting donations to save Russian Jews, and that whole sideline sort of seems to go nowhere. According to IMDB, this script was a hybrid of two screenplays that Steve Tesich was having trouble with, and the end result is so disjointed, I can easily believe that.
New York City is sort of the unmentioned co-star of the film - I didn't move to the city until 1986, so I was watching and saw a few landmarks I was familiar with, like the Blarney Stone, but not very many. But then, I haven't spent too much time on either the Lower East Side or the Upper West Side, which they seemed to sort of toggle between.
Also starring William Hurt (last seen in "Syriana"), Sigourney Weaver (last seen in "Gorillas in the Mist"), Christopher Plummer (also last seen in "Syriana"), Pamela Reed (last seen in "The Best of Times"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Steven Hill, Kenneth McMillan (last seen in "Cat's Eye"), Alice Drummond.
RATING: 4 out of 10 wastebaskets
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