Deterrence

Many of the comments here seem to want to review this movie as if it was a real major motion picture. In reality, this was very much a B movie and should be judged in the same class as movies with giant bunny rabbits and bug-eyed aliens. Not only is the story implausible, but they are adding this film to the definition of the word.

Like many B movies, this film has a few well-known actors who dropped in for the weekend to read it off of cue cards, were paid in cash, and somehow forget to list this film on their resume. Kevin Pollak and Timothy Hutton definitely had alimony payments coming due that weekend. Like all great B movies, the budget was miniscule. The movie takes place entirely in a diner, not because it was a good idea, but because they couldn't even afford decent stock footage. Beyond the few actors with names, the remaining cast was selected by who was in the commissary that day. What's really fun is how the set is obviously raided from scenery storerooms. What's with that British phone booth? And, B movies love to toss around the nukes, with no real thought to strategy, consequences, fallout, war powers act, or anything else at all. Last, but not least, we have the "surprise" ending, which even those who knew the surprise didn't seem to see coming.

There are clearly some fun things about this film. The Iraqi chemical and biological threat that gets sorta forgotten later in the film. The use of two different ocean nuclear detonations to make one supposed city detonation. The news network with more intelligence gathering capabilities than the US government (including their own spy satellite network), and yet having only one anchor and really crummy graphics. The pictures of F-117 fighters referred to as B2 bombers. The compressed time (just how fast were those missiles and bombers flying?), combined with "pacing by snail". The "don't mind us" attitude about random citizens sitting in on a war strategy meeting, occasionally butting in. Let's put the ultra top secret combination for the "football" on speakerphone so everyone can hear!

But, everyone has watched a lot of B movies and found them entertaining (or at least not too boring). I found this film entertaining and made it all of the way through it. It's worth a viewing just for fun (especially if you are not paying for it). After all, you know you saw "Night of the Lepus"!

I was pretty shocked when I saw the overall IMDb rating and the negative user comments. Considering the "one set" limitation - you have to have some pretty good character / dialogue to maintain interest - and I thought the film kept up just the right amount of tension until the truly shocking end - see recent events in Iraq.

I thought the whole point was that the US was threatened during the re-election phase of a President out to prove his metal - Pollack was brilliant.

Its set in a Diner so that the President is FORCED to listen to Joe and Joanna Public - likewise they get to see the inhuman pressures put upon the person in that Office.

Who cares if the bloody B2 looked like an F17 or whatever the bloody plane is supposed to be THAT AIN'T GONNA RUIN THE MOVIE - it was made on a shoestring and is a great example of how to make a substantial picture without spending millions of dollars. It gains gravity from the storyline rather than an A list cast. A strong, gripping film that seems to have grown in relevance over the years.

This 1999 film features an appointed Vice President who assumes Presidential power upon the death of the President -- ergo, a completely unelected President. Interesting concept but more importantly, the basic plot has this President forced to face a major crisis in Iraq when all of his diplomatic and military power is concentrated on a crisis in Korea. Somebody must be reading this script in Washington right now -- but they switched the locations.

At any rate, all of the ranting negative reviews and the flowery positive reviews I have seen here on IMDB about this film seem to me to miss the point. What happens in the film is of limited note compared to very strange feeling of "deja now" watching this film in February, 2003 while watching its big brother on CNN live. See this film! It's interesting, a bit disturbing, and sightly prescient (only partially I hope).

Usually when watching a film, you have a sense of what it's TRYING to achieve.

So cue stock footage and sound clips of previous presidents, set scene in diner cut of from contact with world. Expect mounting claustrophobia, pressure to make decisions without full knowledge of situations, interplay between personalities in a pressure cooker environment.

Here decisions are made at a drop of a hat, interplay is reduced to "I must register my disagreement, Sir" and pressure is at a near climax when the waitress interrupts to refill the coffee.

This film starts sounding like a dove, flaps like a hawk but then wanders off like a turkey!

Overall, the film is pretty good for a low budget FAIL SAFE set in a diner, though I have to admit that I'm glad I saw it on a screening video rather than on the big screen. It plays well, as a good made for cable movie, but not as a big screen feature. The entire film is set in one interior location with the only visual images of the outside world coming from television broadcasts that the characters watch in the diner. A film can be done well shot in one location, as Hitchcock proved, but writer/director Rod Lurie isn't quite up to the challenge and the film sometimes feels sluggish. The film opens with a montage of clips of speeches by former presidents, and one future fictitious one, decrying war, intercut with a view of Earth from space, as the opening credits come up. For some pretentious reason the first five minutes of the film, setting up the support characters in the diner, is shot in black and white and only switches to color with the entrance of the president (Pollak) and his entourage. The locals who inhabit this Diner are one-dimensional stereotypes. There is the weathered and wise old black cook, the ignorant racist trucker, and the dizzy French Canadian waitress. We only know that she's French Canadian because one of the patrons identifies her accent, though her accent shifts back and forth from Southern drawl to a Midwest (Fargo) accent. The film would have been a lot better had these characters been erased from the screenplay all together. Perhaps it had to be set in a diner because the budget couldn't cover a war room or White House set. The crisis story is believable and much of the dialogue between the president and his advisors is well written. Timothy Hutton, as the president's old friend and advisor, has a nice short monologue about the Los Alamos tests and the destruction of Baghdad that does more to evoke the scale of the situation than anything else in the film does. To be fair to the film, I watched it a twice before jotting this down. There was a twist at the end of the film that I thought was out of place the first time I saw it that made sense upon my second viewing. The president has an ace up his sleeve and I thought it was preposterous that he would hold back information from his staff just so the film could surprise the audience at the end. But on second viewing I saw where he advises his staff off screen away from the other characters. Stock footage is used often, and usually pretty well, during the news reports that come into the diner. Though sometimes they should have avoided using stock footage all together. (An F117 is not a B2 bomber and the detonation footage from the Bikini Atoll has been used a thousand times already and detracts from the emotional impact of the moment) It's a fairly clever script that would do well, minus some of the support characters, as a one-act play. It's definitely worth renting when it comes out on video. As for seeing it in the theaters…it's good to see studios like Paramount putting out small original films like this…but I wish it could have been done better for the big screen.