This early 80s oddity has Sean Connery miscast as Patrick Hale, a TV anchorman cum roving reporter who heads out to trouble spots with this TV camera and little else apparently. I can't really buy Connery in a role that George Clooney would be a shoe-in for today, it belongs more to a Cary Grant than Clark Gable type, Connery isn't smooth enough and doesn't convey the moral ambivalence of a media type. It doesn't fit.
My, it's dated. Tootling American soundtrack over long shots of US skyscrapers make it like something out of trash films of the 70s like The Bitch. They don't make 'em like that any more, thank goodness. It also has a truly rubbish opening 15 minutes, where you can't tell it it's meant to be funny or dramatic or not.
What redeems it a fair bit is how topical the satire is, as other reviewers have mentioned. Religious fundamentalism in the White House, tensions between the US and the Middle East, supposed weapons of mass destruction, the role of the media in escalating a crisis, plausible deniablity and suicide bombings on American soil all make this fairly relevant and amazingly prophetic. Leslie Nielsen pops up, too.
It has its Bondian moments, too, with Connery narrating to the President the consequences of a nuclear bomb dropped in New York in a way that evokes a horror totally absent from his Bond thriller a year later, Never Say Never Again. It is a bit of a shame to see Connery give a finely nuanced performance, with all the vital anger and suspicion that put his Bond a notch above the others imo, in a film like this rather than the actual Bond film he returned for. At times you can really see him as the same guy who was in Diamonds Are Forever - he even has the clear diction he had back then, rather than the rather distracting, distinctive lishp he has from Never Say Never Again onwards.
Worth a look for movie buffs, but it's scrappy looking and takes a scattershot approach to its satire. It gets better as it goes on.
My, it's dated. Tootling American soundtrack over long shots of US skyscrapers make it like something out of trash films of the 70s like The Bitch. They don't make 'em like that any more, thank goodness. It also has a truly rubbish opening 15 minutes, where you can't tell it it's meant to be funny or dramatic or not.
What redeems it a fair bit is how topical the satire is, as other reviewers have mentioned. Religious fundamentalism in the White House, tensions between the US and the Middle East, supposed weapons of mass destruction, the role of the media in escalating a crisis, plausible deniablity and suicide bombings on American soil all make this fairly relevant and amazingly prophetic. Leslie Nielsen pops up, too.
It has its Bondian moments, too, with Connery narrating to the President the consequences of a nuclear bomb dropped in New York in a way that evokes a horror totally absent from his Bond thriller a year later, Never Say Never Again. It is a bit of a shame to see Connery give a finely nuanced performance, with all the vital anger and suspicion that put his Bond a notch above the others imo, in a film like this rather than the actual Bond film he returned for. At times you can really see him as the same guy who was in Diamonds Are Forever - he even has the clear diction he had back then, rather than the rather distracting, distinctive lishp he has from Never Say Never Again onwards.
Worth a look for movie buffs, but it's scrappy looking and takes a scattershot approach to its satire. It gets better as it goes on.