hdhale I'd like to say there is something redeeming about the film...I'd like to but...Discovered this film in the middle of the afternoon one Tuesday on a movie channel that will go nameless. Badly acted, badly scripted, too many factual and other errors to count, with a political message that thinks a baseball is too subtle. I found myself rooting for Kevin Pollack's character to grab two pistols from the Secret Service agents and start executing everyone who decided to make a "heartfelt" speech starting with Timothy Hutton's character and working through the rest of the cast.Do yourself a favor. Watch "Fail-Safe" with Henry Fonda. Yes, it too has a political message that thinks a baseball bat is too subtle, has some factual errors, but it at least has the virtue of being well acted and at least semi-plausible for its day.

maxbeaird This was on Film 4 about 1am a couple of days ago. It was like an attempt at a political thriller written by whoever wrote the scripts for those god awful disaster movies in the 70s. As the whole thing took place on one set I wondered if it had been adapted from a stage play. It wasn't, it was the first attempt at writing, directing and producing by a film critic. Couldn't watch more than an hour of this rubbish. Weak characterisation, wooden acting, feeble plot, unbelievable lines and very little grasp of real world politics.Probably went down well with people who's rarely venture outside the limits of Shitkick, pop. 1001.So bad I watched the business news.

jbf-5 In order for a techno-thriller to work, it must at least be plausible enough for us to be willing to suspend belief. This film has absolutely no feel or understanding of even the most basic features of its subject matter. It tries to fake credibility while throwing around ridiculous non-facts such as a 100 megaton bomb, a B2 stealth bomber being casually tracked by Iraqi radar, a TV communications satellite that somehow is equipped with not only a real time TV camera but one that films ground level shots. When the movie shows a clip of the B2, we instead see an F-117 which looks absolutely nothing like a B2. The super duper satellite (actually just one of a small constellation of satellites the TV network supposedly owns) seems to be able to warp back 50 years at will because it captures familiar black and white footage that is obviously from one of the early H-bomb test in the Pacific Ocean. This is more remarkable still as the explosion is supposed to be taking place in the middle of a desert.The President and his advisors are playing out their full intercontinental nuclear game of brinksmanship in a little over an hour, and yet still have time to chat up the morons repeatedly at length in the diner. For some inexplicable reason the morons, including one gun toting one, have not been sent packing by the Secret Service but instead are allowed to butt into and sidetrack negotiations between heads of state in which tens of millions of lives are at stake. The only moron who is even mildly rebuked is a ludicrous right wing homophobic bigoted anti-Semite cardboard character of the sort only a Hollywood provincial pinhead could believe exists out there in fly-over land.All these features seem to be in the film to give it heft and credibility so that it can go about preaching some kind of demented apocalyptic message to us. In the course of their proselytizing, the films writers have their President off handily incinerate a large city of mostly innocents in order to demonstrate what a peace loving mensch he is.Alfred Hitchcock thought that actors were some of God's dumbest creatures. He obviously never met any of the writers, producers, or director of this film.

t-mieczkowski Today, this film feels incredibly untimely due to 9/11. This movie was however made in the Lewinsky-stained days of the 90's. Regardless of the filmmaker's original intent, this film can be viewed as a pseudo-Bradburyian peek into the psyche of the Presidency. A hard-line political drama, few films compare to what it attempts (but largely fails at). It at times seems overwhelmingly unbelievable, but one needs to remember that these are events that even today would have taken place in an alternate dimension -- an alternate future. With that in mind, I recommend all those following US foreign policy to take a look at this film. It is by no means fantastic, but it at least provides those with some knowledge of the American political system some entertainment on slow news days.