Conspiracy

The good guys are good and the bad guys are real bad. Val Kilmer plays a one-legged Billy Jack in a nice twist on a story that will continue forever. Former special forces bad-ass who doesn't want to fight no-more gets roped into an evil environment (with a Dick Cheney clone as Darth Vader) and he finally gets pushed a little too far. He moves fast invisibly "Like a ghost" - with one leg. Works as well here as in old-fashioned radio theater.

Low-budget and thus sparse but well done with myriad close-ups and all characters as caricatures. There is no pretense of realism and thus it works as a comic book on screen. Screenplay, direction, camera work and acting are all at least interesting.

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.

Basic plot: a colorful person finds himself presented with a conspiracy involving the disappearance of a friend. Been done many times and can be very entertaining. But this is not "Bad Day at Black Rock"! First of all, Kilmer is clearly too old to play a crack marine. And he is seriously overweight and stiff. He comes across as grumpy rather than sinister. The setting is just as unconvincing: Supposedly this is a new town being built in the middle of nowhere using cheap Mexican labor. Yet many of the buildings are wild west era in style. Its obviously a generic western movie set, possibly located on Kilmer's own ranch. A 19th century "Dance Hall" is reached by a dirt street with a speed limit sign stuck in the earth, yet its flat as an airport runway. And its not a revitalized ghost town either. Everything is new, as though they just finished shooting an episode of Bonanza. Only the horse trough is missing. The small cast is comprised of stock characters: a young snotty cop who seems to be the entire police department, a beautiful girl running a dollar store with a precious little daughter, naturally terrified of telling the truth. She runs a lending library...with books! No vcrs, no dvds in this town although they have cable TV. Who thinks this stuff up? You are expected to suspend disbelief for dramas but when one anachronism is piled upon another goof on top of a plot hole, its difficult to take the story seriously. And the predictable story grinds on and on like a celluloid glacier. Go to the loo or make coffee, you wont miss anything. I hope this isn't an indication of the direction Kilmers career is taking as he is capable of much better. If you like daffy plots, watch a Steven Segal movie: at least they are entertaining.

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.

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.