BEFORE: The last two films were on Netflix when I planned this chain, but then left that service before I could watch them, so tonight it's something different - this film was on HBO Max, but left THAT service before I could watch it. Either way, I've got iTunes as a sort of catch-all, $3.99 isn't that much to rent a movie there, but I can't do that too often, after a while that sort of adds up to real money, above and beyond what I'm paying for premium cable. But the takeaway is that no matter how many streaming services you subscribe to (and I think we're holding at 5, if you count HBO Max) there's still the very real possibility that if you want to watch THAT particular movie on THAT day, it's not going to be available on any of those services. Why can't there just be ONE service that has everything? Oh, right, because that would be socialism instead of capitalism.
Anyway, if I can finish off this week, it's (more or less) smooth sailing until October 1, except, wait, let me check, nope - there's one sci-fi movie scheduled for late September that's no longer on Netflix, god DAMN it. OK, one more rental fee on iTunes, and my chain is still intact. Really, I try and I try but inevitably I just can't get to everything in time, before it disappears from where it is, and then fails to pop up on another service. Can't somebody DO something about this? Is everybody just OK with this system, where everything's available for a limited time, and then just goes away? Do we all have such short attention spans that I'm the only person bothered by this? I just want every movie in the world available to me forever, so they're all there when I'm ready to watch them, why is that too much to ask for? We're the greatest country in the world, we practically invented movies, they're our greatest export, what's the deal here?
Martin Donovan carries over again from "Rememory".
THE PLOT: A Secret Service agent is framed as the mole in an assassination attempt on the U.S. President. He must clear his name and foil another assassination attempt while on the run from a Secret Service Protective Intelligence Division agent.
AFTER: What is the deal with this movie from 2006, why did I never hear of it before this year? (And, second question, once I did learn about it from being listed on HBO Max, why did it disappear again so quickly?). There's nothing WRONG with it, per se, it just seems to have lived under everybody's radar for the last 15 years. I guess with the law of averages being what it is, there must be a ton of movies like this, they get made, they get released, a few people go to the movie theater to see them, and then everybody just sort of forgets about them. They don't win any awards, they don't make anybody's "Best of" lists, and they don't go on to become sleeper hits or cult classics, they just kind of exist and hope to be re-discovered someday, if only by a few people. There must be some recent movies that would fall into that category, I'd say maybe "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" or "The Devil All the Time" from 2020 - but those were challenging movies, I think maybe they didn't catch on because they were dark and/or confusing. Something like "The Way Back" or "I Used to Go Here", just because they were well-intentioned but didn't CONNECT with people.
I guess action films can be tricky - look at other action films I watched this year, like "The Operative" or "Unlocked", you never hear anybody talk about them, or claim them as their favorite films. These days if a film is neither "Fast" nor "Furious" or part of a superhero franchise, I guess it's hard to rise above all the static. Maybe that's what happened to this movie - but just perhaps, it's worth a second look, because even though it was released in 2006, there's something very prescient about it, particularly in the casting of David Rasche as President Ballantine. He's a character actor that you probably know, but I can't even say what you know him from, because I've been up and down his filmography and I can't even say what I know him from. (Maybe the 1980's parody TV show "Sledge Hammer"?). He's had a role in "United 93", and I remember they didn't want to cast prominent actors in that film, they wanted actors that looked like real people and weren't too, umm, recognizable. But he's had minor roles in everything from "The West Wing" to "Madam Secretary" and played a senator in "Flags of Our Fathers" and a CIA agent in "Burn After Reading". But when you put him in the Oval Office and cast him as the President, he starts to give off a very Trump-ey vibe, even though this was released 10 years before the 2016 election.
The First Lady is played by Kim Basinger, and even though her character is 100% American, and not from Slovenia or wherever, she still looks like she could be a former model - AND clearly there's no physical relationship between her and her husband any more, so naturally I'm going to think about Melania here. When you add in the plot point with the First Lady having an ongoing affair with a Secret Service agent, well, that's just adding more fuel to the fire, isn't it. Weren't there rumors about Melania doing something like that, or was it that she had an affair with the head of security at Trump Tower, or something? We all struggled to find a reason as to why she was still with Trump, and this would explain a lot, or else we figured that she saw the relationship with "The Donald" as the quickest way to get a green card and/or fame and fortune. Remember when she wouldn't move to Washington and live in the White House until she re-negotiated their pre-nup? Yeah, that's really who you want as your First Lady, because clearly her heart's in the job. Now it's what, seven months after leaving Washington and she's still keeping up appearances? Damn, she's good. Or maybe nobody really knows her motivations at all, who can say?
Anyway, that's the jumping off point for this plot, Secret Service agent plus First Lady against the world, or something like that. The President is pretty clueless about what's going on, he just knows that his wife likes to spend a lot of time down at the "beach house" while he's running the country (come on, he's probably getting a bit on the side himself, I mean, isn't that WHY you run for President, in the end?). The lead character here is that agent, plus his old partner who runs the P.I.D. (Protective Intelligence Division, it took me a while to figure that one out), where they deal with the random threats against the President, the ones received by mail or voice-mail, in case they turn into something later on. This character basically has the "Tommy Lee Jones in the Fugitive" role here, both characters are good and right, only they're at cross-purposes, and one has to track the other one down when he goes on the run.
These two, Garrison and Breckinridge, are a bit like oil and water, they used to work together but no longer get along, Breckinridge still thinks Garrison had an affair with his wife, which is why they're separated. It isn't true, but Garrison can't really say, "I would never do that, because I've got enough on my plate, sleeping with the First Lady...", now, can he? But it's important that these two work out their differences, because there's a bigger problem, a mole inside the Secret Service who's planning to kill the President, and he's also killing every agent who comes close to figuring out his identity. God, if only we had a division full of investigative-type people who are used to working in anonymity to uncover hidden security threats...but what's the point of wishing for things we can't have?
I chuckled a bit when there was a shoot-out in public, and Garrison held up his badge to the people nearby and shouted, "Secret Service!" Umm, dude, that's not how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to work in secret, right, dude? Garrison's a guy who's been working since the Ronald Reagan shooting, and never aspired for upper management, or even crew leader. I feel you, Garrison, don't get ahead of yourself, just put in your time, don't make waves and count the years until you can get out alive. Sleeping with the First Lady is apparently enough of a perk to keep him motivated, good gig!
Along the way, we learn some pretty cool stuff, like the fact that the Secret Service can outwit a terrorist just by flipping a coin - the Director always has two crews of cars ready, and two possible paths for the President to take, and decides with a quarter at the last second. Because there's just no way that an organized terrorist group could attack from two directions at once. Also, we learn that a gunman can get away from an active shooting scene just by changing his jacket and putting on a hat. Right. OK, so they may have taken a few narrative shortcuts here, but I still think this film might deserve to not stay under the radar. Maybe it's the name, it's just so generic, this needed a better title, like "In the Line of Fire" or "Absolute Power" or even "Olympus Has Fallen". Was that the problem? A less boring poster might have helped, too.
Also starring Michael Douglas (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "Flatliners" (2017)), Eva Longoria (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Kim Basinger (last seen in "Third Person"), David Rasche (last seen in "Just Married"), Ritchie Coster (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Blair Brown (last seen in "Dogville"), Kristin Lehman, Raynor Scheine (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Chuck Shamata, Paul Calderon (last seen in "Four Rooms"), Clark Johnson (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Raoul Bhaneja (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Yanna McIntosh, Joshua Peace, Simon Reynolds (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"), Geza Kovacs, Jasmin Geijo (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Danny A. Gonzales, Jude Coffey, Gloria Reuben (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Stanley Taylor, Mung-Ling Tsui, Conrad Coates (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Taborah Johnson, Jackie Burroughs (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), with archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Too Big to Fail").
RATING: 5 out of 10 polygraph tests
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