In the cinema, as in most areas of life, one occasionally comes across some strange coincidences. Two years after "Dances with Wolves", one of the two great Westerns of the early nineties, Kevin Costner, its director and star, appeared in "The Bodyguard", a film about a former Secret Service agent named Frank who is haunted by guilt following the assassination attempt on President Reagan and who now has to try and prevent another assassination. A year after the other great Western of the early nineties, "Unforgiven", its director and star Clint Eastwood appeared in "In the Line of Fire", a film about a Secret Service agent named Frank who is haunted by guilt following the assassination of President Kennedy and who now has to try and prevent another assassination.
There are, of course, differences between the two films. In "The Bodyguard" Costner's character, Frank Farmer, has left the Secret Service and now works as a private bodyguard for a female showbiz star. Eastwood's character, Frank Horrigan, still works for the Service. Whereas Farmer is still a comparatively young man, Horrigan is an elderly man approaching retirement, worried about whether he is still physically fit enough to cope with the demands of the job. (Eastwood was sixty-three at the time). Just as "Unforgiven" was Eastwood's final entry in the Western genre in which he made his name in the fifties and sixties, so he seemed to be using "In the Line of Fire" and "A Perfect World" (made in the same year) as his farewell to the cop thriller, another genre which he had come to make his own in the seventies and eighties.
In "In the Line of Fire", Horrigan must thwart a plot to murder the current President by an assassin. There is also a sub-plot about a growing romance between Horrigan and a younger female colleague, Lilly Raines. (Rene Russo, thirty-nine at the time the film was made, was often regarded in the nineties as one of Hollywood's "glamorous older women", but this did not prevent her from being cast here as the love-interest of a man old enough to be her father).
This may seem like the plot of an ordinary political thriller. Although there is plenty in the way of thrills and excitement, it is raised above the level of the ordinary by Wolfgang Petersen's taut direction and by the standards of acting, particularly the duel between Eastwood and John Malkovich as the assassin, who calls himself "Booth", after the murderer of President Lincoln. Unlike the real John Wilkes Booth, however, this man is no political fanatic. He is a psychopathic former CIA operative named Leary with no ideological motive for killing the President, who always remains an anonymous figure. (We never learn whether he is a Republican or Democrat, or even his name). Leary's motivation seems to be taedium vitae, a belief in the purposelessness of life and a desire for notoriety at all costs, even the cost of his own life, and he gets a thrill out of taunting Horrigan (to whom he has announced his intention to assassinate the President) and playing psychological mind-games with him. He knows that Horrigan's weakness is his sense of guilt stemming from the Kennedy assassination, and plays on it ruthlessly. Malkovich plays him as intelligent but unhinged, at times insinuating, at others raving, and he contrasts strongly with Eastwood's decent but haunted Horrigan. The result is one of the more intelligent political thrillers of the nineties, on a par with Eastwood's later effort, "Absolute Power". 7/10
There are, of course, differences between the two films. In "The Bodyguard" Costner's character, Frank Farmer, has left the Secret Service and now works as a private bodyguard for a female showbiz star. Eastwood's character, Frank Horrigan, still works for the Service. Whereas Farmer is still a comparatively young man, Horrigan is an elderly man approaching retirement, worried about whether he is still physically fit enough to cope with the demands of the job. (Eastwood was sixty-three at the time). Just as "Unforgiven" was Eastwood's final entry in the Western genre in which he made his name in the fifties and sixties, so he seemed to be using "In the Line of Fire" and "A Perfect World" (made in the same year) as his farewell to the cop thriller, another genre which he had come to make his own in the seventies and eighties.
In "In the Line of Fire", Horrigan must thwart a plot to murder the current President by an assassin. There is also a sub-plot about a growing romance between Horrigan and a younger female colleague, Lilly Raines. (Rene Russo, thirty-nine at the time the film was made, was often regarded in the nineties as one of Hollywood's "glamorous older women", but this did not prevent her from being cast here as the love-interest of a man old enough to be her father).
This may seem like the plot of an ordinary political thriller. Although there is plenty in the way of thrills and excitement, it is raised above the level of the ordinary by Wolfgang Petersen's taut direction and by the standards of acting, particularly the duel between Eastwood and John Malkovich as the assassin, who calls himself "Booth", after the murderer of President Lincoln. Unlike the real John Wilkes Booth, however, this man is no political fanatic. He is a psychopathic former CIA operative named Leary with no ideological motive for killing the President, who always remains an anonymous figure. (We never learn whether he is a Republican or Democrat, or even his name). Leary's motivation seems to be taedium vitae, a belief in the purposelessness of life and a desire for notoriety at all costs, even the cost of his own life, and he gets a thrill out of taunting Horrigan (to whom he has announced his intention to assassinate the President) and playing psychological mind-games with him. He knows that Horrigan's weakness is his sense of guilt stemming from the Kennedy assassination, and plays on it ruthlessly. Malkovich plays him as intelligent but unhinged, at times insinuating, at others raving, and he contrasts strongly with Eastwood's decent but haunted Horrigan. The result is one of the more intelligent political thrillers of the nineties, on a par with Eastwood's later effort, "Absolute Power". 7/10