Movie Review: The General's Daughter (1999)

A murder mystery and thriller set in a military milieu, The General's Daughter offers slick production values but suffers from over-convoluted plotting.

On an army base in Georgia, Chief Warrant Officer Paul Brenner (John Travolta) of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division wraps up a sting operation. His next case is the murder of Captain Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson), found naked and tied-up on the ground at an urban combat training facility. Elisabeth was an instructor in psychological operations, and also the daughter of celebrated General Joe Campbell (James Cromwell), who is about to retire and enter politics.

Assisting Brenner is his former romantic partner, rape investigator and Chief Warrant Officer Sarah Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe). They initially focus on Elisabeth's shifty commander Colonel Bob Moore (James Woods) as a prime suspect. But soon the investigation becomes more complex, and secrets are revealed about Elisabeth's kinky sex life and her turbulent time at the West Point training academy.

A sordid sex-and-violence crime mystery complicated by honour-bound military traditions, The General's Daughter is polished but overstuffed. The Nelson DeMille novel is transferred to the screen with handsome visuals by cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr., and director Simon West maintains a brisk pace and decorates with military hardware. But the investigative elements are overburdened by motivations straining credibility before devolving into a frantic whodunnit guessing game.

Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman collaborated on the script, and after a bright start they settle down to spraying suspicion on every character in turn, Agatha Christie style. Everyone has a motive and a secret to hide, and Brenner tosses accusations with limited evidence. The truth, once revealed, is bizarre enough to draw groans rather than admiration. The plot tends to wave at moral issues without properly engaging, just as it leaves murder investigation threads dangling. 

But the cross-cutting personal agendas maintain positive energy levels, and The General's Daughter is an effective conversation starter, posing difficult questions about toxicity and inertia within established institutions. At the heart of the drama are serious topics of rape, psychological damage, women in the military, personal sacrifice weighed against reputational damage, political ambitions, and a damaged father-daughter relationship. 

John Travolta is a robust presence at the heart of the action, and Madeleine Stowe is steady but could have benefited from more involvement. Best of all is James Woods, who injects an unsettling beady intensity into his few scenes. To maximize the number of suspects, the cast also finds space for Timothy Hutton, Clarence Williams III, Mark Boone Jr., and two redneck police officers named Yardley.

Eager and capable, The General's Daughter also favours excess over control.

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Movie Review: Revenge (1990)

A revenge drama and smouldering romance, Revenge never overcomes a bland script and aloof performances.

U.S. Navy pilot Jay Cochran (Kevin Costner) retires after 12 years of service and heads down to Mexico to visit his old friend Tibey Mendez (Anthony Quinn), who lives on a sprawling estate defended by armed guards. Tibey's much younger wife Miryea (Madeleine Stowe) is unhappy in their marriage and immediate sets her eyes on Jay. But Tibey is a ruthless political power-broker and will not tolerate anyone stealing his wife's heart. Nevertheless Jay and Miryea embark on a passionate affair, leading to violence. 

Author Jim Harrison adapted his own novella into a screenplay, and Tony Scott directs with his usual eye for visual flair, but the ponderously-paced Revenge never clicks. The film gets bogged down in endless plastic dialogue between Jay and Miryea, Costner and Stowe trading passive line delivery and blank looks set to sappy music. 

Once Jay and Miryea cross the line from talking to lovemaking, Tibey makes his move to forcibly separate the lovers, triggering a gore-fest. The revenge-most-violent aspects apply equally to Jay and Tibey, as both men are intent on redressing wrongs from their perspective, but all the blood-spilling unfolds with mechanical soullessness. 

The second half grows increasingly disjointed and throws a bewildering array of new characters onto the screen. A caring Mexican and his mother, a traveling Texan, a couple of guys with their own revenge agenda, and Sally Kirkland as the lead singer of a touring heavy metal band (?!) all get a few disconnected scenes, quantity trumping quality as none of them are defined well enough to progress beyond the prop stage.

In contrast to the emotion-challenged Costner and Stowe, Anthony Quinn plays Anthony Quinn, domineering, larger than life, gregarious, sneaking in a dance, and with an eye for the kill when necessary. It's an overly familiar performance but at least full of conviction, and when Quinn disappears for a long stretch, the movie loses charm.

The Mexican setting provides Scott with opportunities to capture vivid colours, gorgeous beaches, romantic sunsets, dusty small towns, dank cantinas and local flavour, and Revenge is never less than pretty to look at. The movie also opens with an irrelevant high-speed interlude as Cochran takes his final flight in a Navy jet fighter against a flaming red-orange sky. The director has an inert revenge drama on his hands, and not surprisingly would rather be somewhere else.



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Movie Review: Stakeout (1987)

A police buddy comedy with action and romance, Stakeout benefits from star charisma but remains a shallow exercise in lightweight entertainment.

Violent criminal Richard "Stick" Montgomery (Aidan Quinn) breaks out of prison with help from his cousin Caylor Reese (Ian Tracey). In Seattle, police detectives Chris Lecce (Richard Dreyfuss) and Bill Reimers (Emilio Estevez) are assigned to stake out the house of Montgomery's ex-girlfriend Maria McGuire (Madeleine Stowe) on the chance he may try to reconnect with her.

Chris and Bill try to fight off boredom by trading juvenile pranks with fellow stakeout detectives Pismo (Forest Whitaker) and Coldshank (Dan Lauria). With his wife having just left him, Chris starts to get attracted to Maria, and finds excuses to get into her house pretending to be a phone repair technician. They start a romantic relationship without Maria knowing who Chris really is. Meanwhile, Montgomery evades law enforcement and makes his way ever closer to Seattle.

A prototypical 1980s high concept blockbuster, Stakeout relies much more on glitz and magnetism than plot and logic. Written by Jim Kouf and directed by John Badham, the film sketches in characters and events with the broadest brushes, then relies on Richard Dreyfuss and to a lesser extent Emilio Estevez to deliver the laughs and thrills.

The premise of spying on an available beautiful woman then falling in love with her is a young boy's voyeuristic dream scenario, and Badham is happy to exploit the juvenile opportunities on offer. Maria undresses and showers on cue as demanded by prying eyes, and falls in love quickly with the mysterious telephone repair man who appears at exactly the right moments.

The villain Montgomery is the extreme definition of ruthlessly one-dimensional, and as such a good catalyst for danger to coalesce around him. When it comes time for action Badham delivers the requisite jolts of adrenaline, including a couple of over-the-top car chases and a climax at a lumber processing plant with lethal machinery at work.

Despite the dreadful soundtrack filled with lame 1980s pop rock, the movie is delivered with slick proficiency augmented by banter and comic touches courtesy of inter-police prankterism. And at the middle of Stakeout is Dreyfuss, a long way from his classic roles but infusing much needed doses of quality. Neither the actor nor the movie aim for much beyond basic fun, and both do enough to maintain active surveillance.

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Movie Review: Bad Girls (1994)

A western with four cowgirls as the main protagonists, Bad Girls has a potentially intriguing gender-bending concept but nothing else to offer.

In the wild west, Cody (Madeleine Stowe), Anita (Mary Stuart Masterson), Eileen (Andie MacDowell) and Lily (Drew Barrymore) are friends and whores with hearts of gold having fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. When Cody kills a rough customer, the other three girls rescue her from a hanging and all four go on the run with Pinkerton detectives giving chase. Anita believes she may have a land claim in Oregon, and Cody offers to invest her life savings to help start a sawmill business on the property.

But the cash withdrawal transaction is interrupted by a hold-up committed by the outlaw Kid Jarrett (James Russo) and his gang, and he takes off with Cody's money while Eileen is jailed in the ensuing chaos. Cody and Jarrett share a history, and she is intent on tracking him down and reclaiming her money. Stranger Josh McCoy (Dermot Mulroney) is also interested in finding Jarrett for revenge reasons, while Eileen establishes a relationship with land owner William Tucker (James LeGros).

Bad Girls is an obvious attempt to recreate the appeal of 1988's Young Guns, this time with four photogenic women in the lead roles. Whatever the original intent, the production quickly ran into trouble. Original director Tamra Davis was fired a few days into the shoot and replaced by Jonathan Kaplan, the script was rewritten on the fly, and the lack of cohesion is painfully evident on the screen.

Stuck somewhere between a women's buddy movie and misplaced aspirations to mimic The Wild Bunch complete with a Gatling gun making a late appearance, Bad Girls gallops in quicksand: the harder the film tries to be meaningful, the quicker it sinks. The women are plastic characters provided with one-line backstories, and then left alone to look pouty pretty. The villain is straight out of those bad Spaghetti Westerns where the baddie laughs maniacally at...nothing in particular.

The plot has enough holes to make that Gatling gun proud, and the screenwriters are almost visible to the side of the action frantically dreaming up next morning's scene -- which of the woman shall we place in peril next?!

Given the creative carnage around them the four actresses do their best, but they are further handicapped by flawless hair, perfect make-up, flattering clothes and an apparent abundance of soap throughout: they are made to look gorgeous no matter what trouble they are in, undermining any pretensions of realism.

The energetic climactic shootout injects a sudden dose of adrenaline, but it's too late: by then the film's corpse is well and truly cold.

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Movie Review: 12 Monkeys (1995)

An unhinged and unsettling examination of reality, 12 Monkeys is a warped vision of what may go on within the overwhelmed human mind. That this journey into the brain is told within a context of a gripping science fiction tale of time travel is a triumph for director Terry Gilliam and screenwriters David and Janet Peoples.

Around 1997, 5 billion people are wiped out by a virus. The survivors re-establish an underground human society, away from the contaminated surface, now ruled by wild beasts. Many years past this future, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a prisoner held among the sub-surface humans. He volunteers for a time travel mission to journey back to 1996 and uncover the source of the virus, to aid in the creation of an antidote.  His first trip mistakenly lands him in Baltimore of 1990, and he is immediately thrown into a mental institution where he meets the genuinely mad Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) and sympathetic psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe).

Another trip in time finds Cole landing briefly in the midst of a World War I battle, where he gets shot, before he re-emerges in Baltimore of 1996, kidnaps Railly and sets off to uncover the perpetrators who unleashed the virus. His search leads him to Pittsburgh, and an activist group calling themselves 12 Monkeys, intent on combating cruelty to animals being conducted in the name of scientific research. The leader of the 12 Monkeys is Jeffrey Goines, released from the mental hospital but still much less than balanced, and whose father (Christopher Plummer) runs a virology lab. Cole makes one more trip back and forth in time, and just when Railly starts to believe his story that humanity is about to be destroyed, Cole starts to lose touch with what is real and what is a hallucination.

Gilliam infuses 12 Monkeys with a memorable array of colours, angles and gadgets. The subterranean, post-annihilation world recalls a Mad Max-in-confinement aesthetic, with desperate scientists cobbling together gizmos to try and reclaim the stature of the human race on the surface of the planet. Gilliam colours these scenes brown and yellow, symbolizing the bowels of the earth. The surface scenes with Cole racing to find the origins of the virus have a blue-white hue, a mix of the institutional and artificial. Throughout, Gilliam plays with his camera angles, sometimes to distraction, such that Cole rarely has a moment of serenity or comfort: everything is coming at him with a leading edge.

Brad Pitt stole all the headlines with his performance as the deranged Jeffrey, and he does demand attention: a source of fragmented but high intensity energy, at no point is any part of his body or brain at rest, and often many of his components are moving in different directions as he recounts his version of what he believes to be the truth.

Bruce Willis gets the role with the slower path to madness, starting out as a prisoner in his present underground world, getting to grips with a past world, but gradually losing the defining line between certainty and imagination. Willis pulls off the role with anguished authority, his bravado melting into self-doubt the more he zips back and forth across forbidden dimensions.

Madeleine Stowe is not immune to all the confusion, but although her Dr. Railly is in a better position to understand the brain's ability to twist itself, she ironically finds herself believing Cole's fantastic story of time travel and 5 billion deaths just as he starts to doubt it. The role reversal is a magical moment in 12 Monkeys, the two central characters exchanging positions but tragically not meeting on common ground until it's too late. Stowe delivers a performance that deepens the mystery surrounding the relatively low key level of stardom achieved during her career.

Cole's travel between time zones, and his increasing confusion about what is real, questions the definition of certainty from various perspectives of time and space. Gilliam gradually leads the film to its disquieting conclusion: none of the worlds that Cole inhabits are universally "real"; the current context of the beholder defines only the immediate truth. One of the final scenes zooms deep into the eyes of a young James Cole, witnessing just one tragic reality that is already warped, except that he does not know it.

12 Monkeys is fine science fiction: thoughtful, thought-provoking, entertaining, and delivered with conviction and swagger.

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