FATHER'S DAY SPECIAL
THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER Directed by Simon West Screenplay by Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman from Nelson DeMille's novel With John Travolta, Madeleine Stowe R 115 min
Just in time for Father's Day, "The General's Daughter" swaggered onto the big screen last weekend with a heartwarming story about a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship in the military. If you can't say anything nice, my mother taught me, don't say anything at all, so I'll keep this short.
There's a cast of good actors doing their best with lines like "She could change a tire, and bake a hell of a key lime pie." That line falls to James Cromwell, in his heavy mode here (see "L.A. Confidential") as the General in a sober scene as he recalls his beloved murdered daughter. The daughter is well played by Leslie Stephanson while she lasts -- we even get to see the tire-changing scene. John Travolta is the Army cop investigating her murder, and he does a better job than the writers have any right to expect with their dialogue. Madeleine Stowe as his co-investigator and once-and-possibly-future love interest is beautiful as always, but shows few signs of acting. Most of the rest of the characters are colonels -- Clarence Williams III (of the original "Mod Squad"), John Beasley, Timothy Hutton, and James Woods (whose cagey scenes with Travolta are the best in this whole sorry affair.) One of these colonels is in the movie for no discernible purpose other than to be a surprise bad guy, and you won't have much trouble guessing which.
Early on there's one of those .007 plot-irrelevant action scenes which explodes and disappears without a trace. Then it's on to the sex-and-titillation stuff, which involves your usual stars-looking-at-porn-with-distaste, and then a particularly vicious and gratuitous rape scene where the girl is stripped and spread-eagled to tent pegs, calculated to shock and horrify but still grab the attention with a nicely backlit breast. It's the worst kind of sleazy cinematic pandering.
The whole thing is shot and paced like a bad John Grisham TV movie. There's heavy-handed exposition, tortuous plot twists and connections, and material just plain too ridiculous to turn on the projector for. The general's daughter, a captain in Psy-Ops, explains her work to Travolta: "Mostly we just fuck with people's minds." In this movie, our minds never get that lucky.
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