MURDER AT 1600
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1997 Andrew Hicks
(1997) *1/2 (out of four)
There's only one presidential election every four years, but it seems like every few months we get another presidential conspiracy movie painted as _the_ thriller of the year. In 1997, we've had ABSOLUTE POWER, AIR FORCE ONE, SHADOW CONSPIRACY and MURDER AT 1600. This one is about as lame duck as old Gerald Ford, trying to bring us a complex plot of cover-up and intrigue but copping out over and over again with rehashes of action flick standbys.
Here's what happens this time. It's night at the White House. A secretary is having sex with some unidentified guy with a cute butt. The next day she's dead and hotshot detective Wesley Snipes is called in. How do we know he's a hotshot? We've seen the traditional action flick opener -- the clever hostage negotiation scene. It's not so clever this time, consisting of Snipes disarming a suicidal ex-government employee holding a gun to his head in the middle of the street.
Snipes is off to the White House, where he finds the Secret Service head (the shiny bald head of Daniel Benzali) won't cooperate with him at all. In fact, if not for the intervention of National Security Adviser Alan Alda, Snipes wouldn't have been allowed in the White House at all. Alda helps Snipes out further, assigning a sexy Secret Service agent (Diane Lane) to act as his liaison... a very dangerous liaison. Well, not really, I just wanted to say that.
Almost immediately, a suspect is found, an eccentric night janitor seen flirting with the deceased on one of the security videos. Snipes doesn't buy it, and launches into an independent investigation of his own, one that reveals planted evidence and romantic involvement by the president's son. Snipes' partner, an always- wisecracking Dennis Miller, calls him up every once in awhile with more news and Lane, who at first doesn't believe Snipes, eventually and predictably comes around, and risks her ass to break into Social Security storage and break out some classified information.
For the first hour or so, MURDER AT 1600 looks like it could be going somewhere interesting. Sure, we have to sit through the lame opening sequence and plenty more lame scenes after that, but the whole murder in the White House thing makes for an interesting premise that is never quite delivered upon. Snipes and Lane don't make for a bad action team, but with nothing to work with, they're just cogs in the bad movie machine. Dennis Miller might as well not even be in the movie; they waste his talents more in MURDER AT 1600 than they did in BORDELLO OF BLOOD, and that's saying a lot.
When you get to the last half-hour, the movie has descended metaphorically and literally into a wet sewer, busting out the old break-into-the-building underground climax. And when they finally reveal who killed the woman and why, you'll wish you never sat through this movie at all. The "1600" in the movie's title doesn't represent an address, it represents the number of satisfied customers worldwide.
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