by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
B Rated PG-13 90 min
Five key characters are in Madrid, Spain, to view a summit on terrorism. A television news van is monitoring the events with Sigourney Weaver playing the producer. The President of The United States is there to give a speech. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose when a major terrorist attack is initiated.
Filmmaker Pete Travis and screenwriter Barry Levy cooked up a powerful action film that orbits a main event, telling the story from five satellite characters’ perspectives. It’s an unusual and fractured way to spin the plot, out of real time, and rerunning the videotape back to certain points that relate to each character’s point of involvement. The camera work is chaotic with fast paced edits, simulating the terror in the streets.
Prior to the attack, the Secret Service was informed of a pending attack to assassinate the president. They know what organization planned it, but they do not know who the actual players are. So they send in a body double to make the speech (William Hurt portrays President Ashton and his double). As the faux president takes the podium, two shots ring out and the president is down. Then there is an explosion inside the hotel near the podium. Chaos prevails.
As the Secret Service scrambles to get the wounded faux president out of area, there is a second, bigger explosion in the courtyard where the president was speaking. There are many casualties, including Secret Service agents and dozens of Spanish citizens. It’s pandemonium with terrible carnage in this historic location.
Dennis Quaid plays the President’s senior detail agent, Thomas Barnes, with hair-raising intensity. Some months back he took a bullet and saved President Ashton’s life. This is his first job back after his long medical recovery from the attack.
The story is told as a narrative, following each character’s actions before and after the attack. After each vignette, more of the convoluted plot is revealed. Clearly, Barnes figures out that the terrorists knew too much about the president’s movements. He concludes there must be a mole inside the Secret Service detail. This was a complex, well-planned and coordinated attack.
For Barnes, the attack is his worst nightmare. During the mayhem, he spots a man in the crowd, an American tourist, Howard Lewis (Forest Whitaker) who was videotaping the entire event. He got a shot of where the sniper was located. Barnes’ second-in-command is Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox), who is shook up after the explosion but still functioning. Barnes runs into the news van to watch the reruns of the incident. On a monitor, he spots something incredibly disturbing, and now he knows there is much more to this event than he could have possibly imagined.
As each character’s story plays out, viewers learn more about the terrorists’ elaborate master plan. Meanwhile, Barnes is desperately trying to bring some order to his unit, some are dead or seriously wounded from the explosion. Rerunning the tape back to certain spots can be annoying, but the payoff is rewarding. A frantic car chase ensues with Barnes chasing two terrorists. This chase scene through the streets of Madrid goes on and on, a la the French Connection.
At some point in the unfolding story, all the characters intersect like colliding asteroids, with many gun battles and bodies piling up. Travis created a hardcore action film that resolves nicely.
Article Published in the 2-21-08 Issue of EU Jacksonville
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