Deterrence

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!

I must admit I had to see the film twice to appreciate all the detail that was included. This is one man's vision, Rod Lurie, since he wrote, directed and produced the film and the more that I watch it, the more I appreciate what was done. The problem with this type of film is that most people will not be able to give it the attention it deserves.

I can't complain about the casting or the acting, since the actors stayed true to the vision of the film. The story is riveting and full of surprises and with a fine touch of comic relief. The most interesting thing for me about the film is that it's completely relevant for today (2002), which is when I discovered it.

Don't watch this with your significant other when you want to snuggle. It's disturbing, engrossing and most definitely provocative.

What happens when the US President on the campaign trail is caught in a Colorado snow storm and holes up in a diner with his entourage only to learn from a t.v. broadcast that Iraq has again invaded Kuwait? "Deterrent" attempts to answer that question as it, with a handful of actors in one room, sets the stage for WWIII. Short of some implausible moments, a few oversights, and an obvious absence of the expected profusion of sweat such a situation would precipitate, this well scripted and well acted film gathers momentum quickly and manages to hold interest with the abundance of technical and moral issues it conjures up.

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"!

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.