Conspiracy

I like this genre and I like Val Kilmer but this movie was really bad.

First, let's get this straight: CONSPIRACY is a straightforward, modern-day remake of the Spencer Tracy classic, BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. Val Kilmer takes on the Tracy role, playing an outsider who arrivals in a small town to track down his missing friend. Turns out that everybody knows something, but nobody's saying anything.

I liked this film for the most part because it avoids clichés and it doesn't rely on cheesy action to propel the storyline. After the prologue, the first hour or so is engaging and suspenseful, building up a level of intrigue that most B-movies rarely attempt. There's an air of mystery hanging over the whole production and you actively want to find out what's going on.

Gradually, the story does fizzle out a bit as it progresses, and the last half hour resorts to the usual clichés: massive shoot-outs, showdowns in the desert, bad guys getting just deserts, and so on. The cast members are adequate for this production; Kilmer is at least trying as the former soldier suffering from PTSD, while Gary Cole can do this sinister villain stuff in his sleep by now.

The biggest disappointment is from Adam Marcus, the director. This is a guy who worked once since 1993's JASON GOES TO HELL, and his lack of experience shows. The dialogue scenes are passable, but the action sequences are hellishly bad. It appears they ran out of money for stunts or decent choreography because the action is all over the place and a real mess, sapping enjoyment at the showdown which should be a bit of glorious vengeance. Still, CONSPIRACY gets a lot of kudos from me for the first hour...

The plot: A former marine, trying to find out what happened to his friend, runs up against racist vigilantes.

I've never actually been that big of a Val Kilmer fan, but I'm willing to watch his movies. Unfortunately, as some people have already mentioned, this movie shares more than a few similarities to Steven Seagal's direct-to-video movies. It's got a left-leaning political message, an aging and out-of-shape movie star, and some truly awful dialogue.

I'm not going to lie. This is not a good movie. It's completely lacking in subtlety, one of the characters goes on a long political rant in the middle of the movie, and the fight choreography was not very impressive. However, I agree with the politics, I like Gary Cole, and I guess I'm a sucker for these cheesy direct-to-video movies. I'm willing to overlook a lot of things as long as I don't get bored.

I can't really recommend this movie to other people, but I found it a lot more tolerable than most reviewers. If you're a liberal, you're looking to waste 90 minutes, and you're a fan of Val Kilmer... well, maybe then you might want to see this movie, but you'd still have to be pretty desperate.

Val's character maintains a deadpan countenance throughout being blown to bits in Iraq, lifelessly engaging with hookers, and then getting beat down mercilessly by hateful gringos in Arizona who murdered his war buddy & family in cold blood. Wickedness dominates throughout so that even when he finally fights back, its anti-climactic, although he does do some slick special ops ghost work on some of those slimey pukes. There's a scene where the ditzy chick points a pistol at the arch baddie, and instead of immediately squeezing off multiple rounds, she dialogs with him, yakkity-yakking long enough for a henchman to come up behind her and take the gun. That scene is representative of how hard this movie is to watch. All that can be said positively about this movie is that it has Val Kilmer in it.

This was pretty abysmal, and all things considered, I probably should have known better when it said written and directed by Adam Marcus. Except that I had no idea who Adam Marcus was. Given his track record, justifiably so. The depressing part isn't so much the plot (which was written by your little brother in crayons), as much as it was watching Val Kilmer sink to new lows in his otherwise mostly storied career. When I tried to rationalize why Val Kilmer would stoop to the level of this ostensibly lost A-Team episode script directed by appointed directors like Marcus, all I could come up with would be his contempt for the real world equivalent to the radical right-wing Minutemen-like goons littering this pseudo-entertaining steaming pile of straight-to-vid. As it turns out, I was at least partially right, Kilmer did this movie for personal/political reasons (according to the related trivia).

I would write a summary, except I'm loath to spending more than the 90 minutes I already wasted watching it. You've seen it before, except this time it isn't Steven Seagal fighting for the rights of Native Americans, or Billy Jack fighting for the hippie commune, it's Val Kilmer fighting against a shoestring budget, and implied Halliburton employees as laughably stereotypical rednecks for the sake of immigrant rights and liberal ideology. A great cause, but ill-conceived and poorly executed here.

But don't take my word for it, no really. I want someone else to have to endure what I did.