![]() ![]() To be fair to the film, I watched it a twice before jotting this down. Timothy Hutton, as the president's old friend and advisor, has a nice short monologue about the Los Alamos tests and the destruction of Baghdad that does more to evoke the scale of the situation than anything else in the film does. The crisis story is believable and much of the dialogue between the president and his advisors is well written. Perhaps it had to be set in a diner because the budget couldn't cover a war room or White House set. The film would have been a lot better had these characters been erased from the screenplay all together. We only know that she's French Canadian because one of the patrons identifies her accent, though her accent shifts back and forth from Southern drawl to a Midwest (Fargo) accent. There is the weathered and wise old black cook, the ignorant racist trucker, and the dizzy French Canadian waitress. The locals who inhabit this Diner are one-dimensional stereotypes. For some pretentious reason the first five minutes of the film, setting up the support characters in the diner, is shot in black and white and only switches to color with the entrance of the president (Pollak) and his entourage. The film opens with a montage of clips of speeches by former presidents, and one future fictitious one, decrying war, intercut with a view of Earth from space, as the opening credits come up. A film can be done well shot in one location, as Hitchcock proved, but writer/director Rod Lurie isn't quite up to the challenge and the film sometimes feels sluggish. The entire film is set in one interior location with the only visual images of the outside world coming from television broadcasts that the characters watch in the diner. It plays well, as a good made for cable movie, but not as a big screen feature. Overall, the film is pretty good for a low budget FAIL SAFE set in a diner, though I have to admit that I'm glad I saw it on a screening video rather than on the big screen. ![]()
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