BEFORE: There's just one thing to do after I hit the halfway point for the year, and that's to keep on keepin' on, with a Johnny Depp chain that should get me to the Memorial Day weekend. This feels like one of those everyday movies that nearly everybody should have seen by now, but it somehow slipped through the cracks for me, possibly because I was so busy in the 1990's? Anyway, this film's been bouncing around my list for a couple years now, since I recorded it to fill up a DVD with that last "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, so it's high time to clear it.
THE PLOT: An unimpressive, everyday man is forced into a situation where he is told to kill a politician to save his kidnapped daughter.
AFTER: If that L.A. train station at the start of the film looks familiar, I think it's because that's where they held the Oscars ceremony this year. So I guess at some point it stopped being a train station and started being a function room? Nope, it's still a train station, but I guess just fewer people were using it to travel during the pandemic? Anyway, it's where the Amtrak trains leave L.A. to get to San Diego and the big Comic-Con, I know a bunch of people who've made that run. It's also been seen in movies like "Silver Streak", "Blade Runner" and "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid".
Anyway, most of the film takes place in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, which is another real place in L.A., as our hero, Gene Watson, has several chances to kill the Governor of California, Eleanor Grant. He's been given her itinerary by a mystery man who's kidnapped his daughter, and in order to save his daughter, he's got to kill the governor, and for some reason it has to happen before 1:30 pm. This seems like a rather arbitrary deadline, but the gimmick is that the movie starts at 12 pm and plays out in real time, so 1:30 pm coincides with the end of the film - and I guess if you start playing Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album when you see the opening logo, then you've got way too much time on your hands.
Watson spends most of the film either trying to figure out a way out of his situation, or trying to delay the shooting by saying he needs a drink or has to use the bathroom - you know, the way most of us manage to get through the average workday. He tries to turn the tables on the other kidnapper, he tries to get help from the cab driver and the shoe-shine guy, anything to avoid doing the task at hand. What a slacker, these corrupt security guards could not have made it easier for him to slip through security with a handgun, and still, he can't bring himself to just shoot and kill one person during a public speech.
It's blatantly obvious, though, that the mystery man or one or more of his cohorts is going to kill Watson in a hail of bullets as soon as he shoots the Governor, thus covering up all evidence of the conspiracy. So he knows it's either his life or his daughter's that's going to end, possibly both, unless he makes some bold move to change the game - he just can't seem to figure out what that bold move should be, though. Nobody works well when the clock is ticking, it seems.
I began to wonder if this was all some big JFK metaphor - if you believe that the bullets came at the president's motorcade from several different angles, from the grassy knoll and the highway overpass and the book depository all at once, then you may see a similarity here. This supports the possibility that Oswald was a patsy, that he did what he did because somebody kidnapped or threatened somebody he cared about, and then there was no way out of the situation, even if he followed orders then somebody was sure to assassinate him, sooner or later, to cover everything up. I'm not a big believer in the multiple-shooter theory, but Jack Ruby's actions were never fully explained, right?
I didn't pick up on the homages to Hitchcock, though - the dream about falling through the open-air hotel was sort of a "Vertigo" thing, in retrospect, and I guess the rest follows bits of "The Man Who Knew Too Much"? It seems more like a tribute to "The Manchurian Candidate", though, to me. I'm also not sure that anybody would plan several different speeches in the same hotel for a governor, this seems just way too convenient so that there can be several chances to kill her without booking another filming location, but I'll admit I don't know much about political speech scheduling.
Also starring Christopher Walken (last seen in "Father Figures"), Charles S. Dutton (last seen in "Cookie's Fortune"), Roma Maffia (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Marsha Mason (last seen in "Heartbreak Ridge"), Peter Strauss (last seen in "xXx: State of the Union"), Gloria Reuben (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), G.D. Spradlin (last seen in "Dick"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Yul Vazquez (last seen in "Last Flag Flying"), Edith Diaz, Armando Ortega, Peter Mackenzie (last seen in "Trumbo"), Rick Zieff, Courtney Chase, with a cameo from L.A. mayor Tom Bradley.
RATING: 5 out of 10 marching band members
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