DIRECTOR
Simon
West
SCREENWRITERS
Christopher
Bertolini
William Goldman
based
on the novel by
Nelson
DeMille
PRODUCER
Mace Neufeld
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter Menzies Jr.
MUSIC
Carter Burwell
EDITOR
Glen Scantlebury
CAST
John Travolta (Paul Brenner)
Madeleine Stowe (Sara Sunhill)
James Cromwell (Campbell)
Timothy Hutton (Kent)
Leslie Stefanson (Elisabeth)
Daniel von Bargen (Yardley)
Clarence Williams III (Fowler)
James Woods (Moore)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 116m
U.S. release: June 18, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Simon
West tripe
reviewed on this website:
- Con
Air
- Lara
Croft: Tomb Raider
|
Of
the many questions swirling through my head after seeing The
General's Daughter, a lurid and ludicrous new thriller, one
question in particular stands out: Do the filmmakers think we're
morons? We're certainly treated as such, right from the beginning.
A military officer (John Travolta) is called to investigate the
murder of a young female captain. When he sees her face, he recognizes
her -- and we do, too, because we've just seen him share two
scenes with her. Yet the movie gives us a fleeting image of her
from one of those scenes, as if we needed the reminder. Also,
who else would we think it is? At this point, she's the
only woman we've seen.
The movie doesn't trust us to make that connection, and it also
thinks we're too dumb to make other connections that undermine
the plot. The General's Daughter, based on a Nelson DeMille
bestseller, never makes any sense. The characters (aside from
Travolta's hero) exist only as red herrings. The young woman
is found dead, naked, and bound spread-eagled in the middle of
an army complex. Who put her there? Who killed her? Our natural
desire to know gives the movie's first half a slight interest.
But as the explanations pour in, like buckets of water drenching
a mound of dirt, they just muddy the plot rather than clearing
it up.
The young woman, as we might have guessed from the title, was
the daughter of the army base general (James Cromwell). She also,
apparently, had some rather colorful hobbies off duty, involving
whips and chains. All this, and she's an expert in psychological
warfare, too. The movie itself engages in psych warfare, flashing
us with ugly images of the woman's past traumas, as if to explain
both her kinks and her violent end, and as if she meant anything
other than being a dead naked chick to titillate multiplex audiences.
Travolta is joined by a rape investigator, Madeline Stowe, who
tries to keep her dignity despite having very little to do. She
and Travolta often engage in the sort of verbal ping-pong cherished
so much by co-scripter William Goldman, who never met a zinger
he didn't like. Mostly, the snappy patter produces not laughter
but impatience. Goldman does, however, write a deft scene between
Travolta and James Woods, as the deceased's "mentor."
Woods, amusing himself by batting his dialogue around as a cat
toys with a mouse, is easily the best thing in the movie; he's
also not around for long, but the film unwisely goes on without
him.
Indeed, The General's Daughter continues to bore and insult
us; the director, Simon West (Con
Air), obviously thinks he's still working for Jerry Bruckheimer,
and we get an early action scene -- involving Travolta, an angry
soldier, and a boat propeller -- that seems to be tossed in so
as not to lose us dummies in the audience. There is also an allegedly
nail-biting climax in a mine field, which ends the only way such
a formulaic thriller can end: the bad guy gets blown sky-high.
Whoopee! Those who go to this movie expecting a serious military
thriller had better be in the mood to laugh bitterly at their
own expense.
The bitterest laugh comes at the very end, when a card informs
us that "400,000 women are in the military." Well,
what does that mean, given what we've just seen? Is the
movie saying that atrocities perpetrated on female soldiers by
male soldiers should be covered up so that women can continue
to be allowed into the military? Or that women shouldn't be allowed
into the military because things like this might happen? None
of this, of course, matters a damn, since the dead woman is meant
only as a corpse to animate a contrived whodunit. That important-sounding
card at the end is the final insult to our intelligence, and
the final nail in the movie's coffin. |
