Deterrence

You should see this movie, it is interesting and entertaining. It reminds me of the Cuban Missile Crisis and another conflict with another country. It was good especially since it seemed like a low budget film due to the only setting through the movie was in the Diner.

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.

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.

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.

I had seen the trailer for this movie a couple of months back, before the events of the last month, and I knew then that I wanted to see the movie. This weekend, I watched it and was shocked at how amazing it was.

Almost paralleling the events of the past couple of months, in the film, the current President (Pollock) must deal with rising problems with North Korea, and the sudden invasion of Kuwait by Saddam's son, who is the current military leader of Iraq. Finding his hands tied, the President issues a warning to the Iraqi leader: leave Kuwait and power down your weapons of mass destruction, within two hours, or else you and your city will be hit with a nuclear bomb.

After this threat, the film does into high pressure tension mode. Will the President keep his promise? Is he bluffing? And what is going to happen if he does use a nuclear bomb against his enemies?

Trust me, this is a film that will NOT disappoint.