mantis-11

This film was produced to promote a malignant lie: that the 1890's, thanks to the far greater influence of Christian churches, were a more moral time in America than the present. In truth, the end of the nineteenth century was an era defined by great moral evils: institutionalized racism enforced by routine lynching, laws that made women second-class citizens and little more than property to their husbands, the nearly-completed ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, vicious oppression of anyone whose sexual identity varied in any way from the heterosexual, monogamous norm, widespread religious bigotry, and horrendously cruel and dangerous working conditions in mills and factories, especially for the young children who made up a significant part of the industrial workforce. Furthermore, those evils were actively supported by most churches.

Some of these evils, the modern Christian Right likes to pretend didn't exist, or at least that their own intellectual forbears weren't the leading perpetrators and apologists; the rest, they're still trying to resuscitate or perpetuate, in part through vile propaganda like this film. Ironically, the modern Christian Right even seeks to undo many of the laws that protect workers' rights -- the oppression of labor was the one form of institutional oppression that evangelical Christians at that time wholeheartedly opposed, with one of their greatest leaders, William Jennings Bryan, in the forefront of the struggle, but their descendants have been co- opted by the heirs of the amoral robber barons Bryan fought.

The problems was not that the movie was awful (apart from the typically wooden performance by Freddy Prinze, Jr. -- and why the heck has Matthew Lillard, who can actually ACT -- see "SLC Punk if you don't believe me -- spent so much of his career playing second banana to that meat-head?), but rather that the last three games are better MOVIES than the movie: they had better casts, better stories, better dialogue, even better visual effects (in the cut scenes, at least) and better musical scores! (I can still hum the main theme to "Heart of the Tiger," some six years after I last played it, and it still sends chills down my spine.) While Tcheky Karyo and David Warner put in fine performances as James "Paladin" Taggart and Admiral Sir Geoffrey Tolwyn, they could never match the terrific work of John Rhys-Davies and Malcolm MacDowell, who played Taggart and Tolwyn in the games. Nothing in the uninspired script compares with Tolwyn's sneering "Well, colonel, what would you aim for if you had the biggest gun in the universe?" Prince Thrakhath's "Heart of the Tiger" speech, or the not-so-friendly banter between Mark Hamill's Christopher Blair and Tom Wilson's "Maniac" Marshall. It might be worth a rental, if you love military SF, but if you're looking for something worth buying, get the games instead.

I just saw this recently, and found it interesting that the details of the case in it follow quite closely those of the controversial execution of Karla Faye Tucker Brown. Karla committed a double murder much like that portrayed in the film, and, like the film's Cindy Liggett, reformed her life in prison. Also like Liggett, she was a fairly attractive, articulate woman who argued eloquently, though futilely, for clemency. Unlike Liggett, however, Karla became a born-again Christian, and her clemency plea was supported by several prominent pastors including Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It is thus notable that the governor who signed her death warrant was none other than our current, allegedly born-again President, George W. Bush. It is possible that nothing in Bush's checkered career reveals his true character more clearly than his callous, smirking mockery of Karla's dignified plea for her life during an interview with Talk Magazine the year after her execution.

Incidentally, Karla Faye Tucker Brown was killed by the state of Texas in 1998, two years after this film came out. That suggests that the filmmakers might have been trying to to make an argument for clemency, as Errol Morris did for Randall Adams with his documentary "The Thin Blue Line." If so, it failed miserably.