ABSOLUTE POWER
A film review by Chuck Dowling
Copyright 1997 Chuck Dowling
Absolute Power (1997) * out of ***** - Cast:Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Judy Davis, E.G. Marshall, Laura Linney. Writer:William Goldman. Director:Clint Eastwood.
In 1992, Clint Eastwood won a Best Director Oscar for his excellent western "Unforgiven". The next year he followed that up by directing the equally excellent "A Perfect World". In 1995 he received great acclaim for directing "The Bridges of Madison County". Something has happened to Clint Eastwood. Something bad.
"Absolute Power" is an absolute mess. The film opens with two very pointless scenes, and then dives into the story. It seems that Eastwood is a burglar and one night he decides to break into the house of a millionaire (Marshall). While in the vault of the house, a drunken couple enters the room. Eastwood is able to hide in the vault, and luckily it has a two-way mirror so that he can see everything going on. As it turns out, the two people are the millionaire's wife, and the President of the United States (Hackman). As they play around with each other, the film keeps cutting to Eastwood every three seconds so he can look disgusted. We must see this reaction 75 times during the scene. The President then decides he's going to slap the girl around, and then turns into a raving psychotic. He tries to kill the girl (this is the President of the United States folks) and during the struggle the secret service breaks into the room and kills the girl. Eastwood now must decide whether or not to run or to try and bring down the President of the United States.
Eastwood is also supposed to be a "master of disguises". His brilliant disguises consist of a hat and jacket, sometimes a fake mustache. Amazingly, even though he just looks like Clint Eastwood with a hat on, he is able to fool people who are just 10 feet away.
Eastwood has used the same composer for his films since the mid-80s, a person by the name of Lennie Niehaus, who is absolutely terrible. However, in "Unforgiven", "A Perfect World", and here again in "Absolute Power" there's about 5 minutes of really good score. Each and every time, Clint Eastwood has composed that score himself. So why can't he do the entire film? He obviously knows what good score is. Why he lets Niehaus compose a boring score for each movie he makes is beyond me.
There is one decent scene in the film. It's when the cop assigned to the case (Harris) goes to talk to Eastwood about his possible connection with the crime. It's a very simple scene, it's just two men talking. But the two stars seem to play off of each other well and I was hoping for more interaction between their two characters.
The resolution of the events in the film is both unsatisfying and unclear. But the main problem with the whole premise is that the villain of the film is the President of the United States. It's absurd. Another problem is that the President, being an insane psychopath, should be the main focus of the film. He's not. Hackman is in the film for maybe 15 minutes, most of that being the scene where he's trying to rape and kill the girl. I hope Hackman got paid a lot of money for his cameo appearance. It's also equally absurd that we are supposed to be rooting for Eastwood, who is also a criminal. But I guess since he's not a violent criminal then that makes it ok.
-- Chuck Dowling Visit Chuck's Movie Reviews at http://users.southeast.net/~chuckd21/ Over 1,600 movies rated and/or reviewed! Movie news, box office reports, film related links, and reader's polls and reviews.
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