Review: The General's Daughter (1999) Director: Simon West MPAA Rating: R (Nudity/Sex/Violence/Language) 116 minutes
A DVD review by Mike Summers
* out of *****
This movie stinks! Although it is professionally crafted and there are some decent performances, the plot is so bad it drags the film into the abyss. I knew I was in for trouble when, during the opening establishment shots, we see a detailed close-up of Warrant Officer Paul Brenner's (John Travolta) military identification card and it is the wrong color. This might seem like a minor detail, but anyone who has spent anytime with the military knows that active duty identification cards are green and dependant cards are yellow. And what about the senior military officer whose uniform shirt is so wrinkled he looks like he is a recruit on his first day of training. Or what about when Brenner tells a suspect that, because he is in the military, he doesn't have the right not to answer his questions even though these rights were central to military law well before the Miranda decision. How hard is it to get someone familiar with the military to check these facts? Now details like this could be overlooked if the underlying story held up, but this story is so full of holes it is painful to sit through. For example, at the beginning of the film, Paul Brenner, an undercover Army investigator, gets into a gun and knife battle at his off-post houseboat and winds-up killing an arms dealer he had been investigating. The local police investigating the death are openly hostile to the military and they discover that Brenner has been lying to them about the killing. But instead of arresting him, or at least take him into custody for further questioning, they release him. Duh! Ultimately, Brenner gets assigned to investigate the murder and possible rape of the commanding general's daughter, a young captain also assigned to the post. When Brenner finds graphic sex tapes featuring the general's daughter, does he use them to generate a suspect list and begin grilling suspects. No, his instinct is to suppress them because they might be potentially embarrassing. Eventually, Brenner discovers that this murder is related to a violent gang rape at West Point eight years earlier. I won't even go into the totally unbelievable rationale for the Army's suppression of this horrendous crime. I will just mention one final flaw. Brenner is investigating a crime that occurred in Georgia. The rape occurred in West Point, which is in New York. He is under a very tight (and totally implausible) 36-hour deadline to solve this case. He needs to discuss the rape with a psychiatrist at West Point. Does he phone the doctor? No, he travels (via some unexplained very fast transport) to New York to question the psychiatrist in person, and then he returns to Georgia (again by the miracle transport), without once worrying about the impact any of this will have on his deadline. You have been warned, stay away from this one.
Review by: Mike Summers (BikeMan-202) on 14 March 2000. Email: michael@smart.net
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