1993- IN THE LINE OF FIRE & 2002 - PHONEBOOTH two bland thrillers

Digging deep into the collection watched 2 thrillers this past weekend. In The Line Of Fire features Clint Eastwood as a secret service agent attempting to stop the assassination of the President of the United States, by the crazed, brilliant, ruthless, John Malkovich. Malkovich is a master of disguise even though all of his disguises still make him look like John Malkovich.

 

 His reasons for killing the President seem a little unclear with the exception of his sticking it to Eastwood who he has decided to mess with. Malkovich also has an unlimited supply of money which allows him to fly around the country, build improbable electronic devices that stop the Secret Service from locating him, and allow him to construct wacky weapons that can't be detected by metal detectors and scanners.

Clint also has a love interest played by Rene Russo. Russo was an older actress who usually got hired to play love scenes with aging male stars. As male actors moved into the later part of their careers, love scenes they played with younger actresses usually made the age difference look like the actresses were just out of after school day care programs. A producer would hire Rene Russo, who generally looked pretty good for a woman in her mid 40's, to make the love scenes look a little less creepy. Their relationship in the movie is probably the most interesting thing about this story, unfortunately that's only about 10 minutes of the film's running time, after which we get back to the business of Clint being Clint, and nailing the psycho assassin.

 

This isn't a bad film, it's just a bland one. Clint takes on the psycho, you get lots of action scenes, Clint wins in the end, movie over. 

Running time, 126.  Written by  Jeff Maguire

Which brings me to Phone Booth. Directed by Joel Schumacher, Batman and Robin, Batman Forever, a glitzy mainstream director and written by "B" movie veteran Larry Cohen of It's Alive, It Lives Again. This was a very improbable film about a man stuck in a telephone booth. If he leaves the phone booth he will be shot by a sniper hiding in a building nearby. The sniper torments the man over the phone while the police surround the phone booth and try to figure out what the hell is going on. This thriller is a very tall tale filmed with lots of Hollywood gloss, it's sharply edited and uses split screen techniques to keep the audience from being bored to tears because watching a guy talking on a telephone for about 81 minutes is nobody's idea of a good time.

 

Unfortunately the Hollywood gloss is what fails the film. This is the kind of junk that probably should have been directed by Larry Cohen himself. Cohen was a master of cranking out this kind of thing on a low budget, and this film needed a no frills low budget approach. A big disappointment for a film that should have been foolish fun.