This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
She Was a Casualty Of War
Plot Overview
A secretary's corpse
discovered in a White House john brings Homicide Detective Harlan
Regis (Wesley Snipes) and Secret Service Chief Nick Spikings (Daniel
Benzali) into conflict over jurisdiction. Evidence gets tucked away and
suppressed to avoid embarrassment to President Jack Neil (Ronny Cox); it
implicated his playboy son Kyle (Tate Donovan.) Liaison Secret Service
agent Nina Chance (Diane Lane) smells a rat and behind her superior's back
she teams up with Det. Harlan who'd
been brushed off. When they get too close to the truth, a conspiracy closes
in to “disappear” them.
Ideology
The leitmotif of this tale is two persons initially at odds with each other teaming up for mutual benefit. It follows the line of, (Eccl. 4:9-12) “Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Detectives work in pairs achieving noted success; “they have a good reward for their labour.” Here Harlan's partner is Detective Stengel (Dennis Miller.) One surreptitiously passes the other some critical evidence at the crime scene to smuggle out past the Secret Service. They've got each other's backs. “For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow.”
There's an odd emphasis
on the “woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath
not another to help him up.” Harlan's off-duty hobby is Civil
War buff stuff. In his apartment he's got a room size tableau of the first
battle of Bull Run, near Manassass, Virginia, the first major battle of the
American Civil War. It's where Confederate General “Stonewall”
Jackson got his sobriquet for his stubborn defiance standing solid like a
stone wall. Harlan sets his action figure in place.
When he returns to his apartment, he finds the figure's horse had fallen onto the floor (“How did you get down here?”) sans general (“Where's your rider at?”) Obviously there had been an intruder in his apartment, and the other plastic figurines were unable to help right their comrade-in-arms for obvious reasons. Harlan had to do it. He was a higher power in the room. Which at first seems odd, a Negro benevolent force intervening on behalf of the Confederates who were fighting to uphold slavery. But it gets weirder.
Through the whole movie, makeup and costuming had Harlan holding a cigarillo in his puffy, Negroid lips, his face framing it between hair cut short and a chinstrap beard. The mini-stogie is always just a stub but we never see him smoking it, although once we do see him remove a new one from its cellophane wrapper. ‘Take a puff, already,’ we want to say. That smoke is front and center.
From a historical perspective, Virginia didn't start out having slaves, but they needed them to grow their labor-intensive tobacco crop. There weren't enough able-bodied men to fill the bill, so they used slaves imported from the Caribbean: Aruba and such places. That was their economy back then. I was reading about Amish tobacco farmers. The Amish don't use modern technology but rely on manual labor. A big, strapping college student wanted to work on an Amish farm for a summer, but it was too difficult for him and he quit. One has to be born into that heavy work. People had to have their smokes, and Harlan sure represented that fact though he was black.
It's almost as if history had a mind
of its own not to be put off by some piddling Civil War. There was
an oppressive African slavery, made a little easier in Virgina. The
Civil War set the slaves free, at least theoretically. But it took
a while for the plantation owners, some of them, to get the memo.
And then there was sharecropping, hardly a step up. President
Hayes did an about face. He put an end to reconstruction and
re-established “home rule” in the South. They enacted Jim
Crow laws. They implemented segregation.
Martin Luther King (MLK) in his Letter From
Birmingham Jail seeking reform penned a whole litany of complaints,
rejected the counsel of “gradualism,” and touted “the
fierce urgency of NOW.” He ends his letter with an apology:
“If I have said anything in this letter that is an
overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an
unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me.” Let's
not hold it against him; he was caught up in the fever of his times.
In the end, the universe tends to unfold as it should. Robert H. Bork in Slouching Towards Gomorrah (238) writes:
[Researchers] Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer … quote Charles Murray: “There's hardly a single outcome—black voting rights, access to public accommodation, employment, particularly in white collar jobs—that couldn't have been predicted on the basis of pre-1964 trend lines.” “That's pretty devastating,” the authors say. “It suggests that we have spent trillions of dollars to create an outcome that would have happened even if the government had done nothing.”
MA1600 starts with a suicidal suit having a meltdown in the street over being fired (“They let me go.”) Isn't that what happened to the slaves right after the Civil War? They were put out in the cold (“They just threw me out.”) Couldn't have been easy, liberty notwithstanding. The complexities have been covered in other movies, here it's just focused on Virginia & Washington.
“Again, if two lie together,
then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone?” The suicidal
man lacked the human touch, he felt isolated. When Harlan moved close,
he was able to give him a love tap to “handle” the situation.
The president's golden retriever was routinely petted. In the work
environment colleagues poked and jabbed each other in good spirit. A lonely
man could rub a girl's neck from behind, say, in the cafeteria to
“come on to her.” He is easily rebuffed. Handsome, high
status Kyle was making good progress on getting “laid in every room
in the White House.” Some of the dumped women, though, came back to
haunt him. The president and first lady were married, they produced a son,
and on the verge of a major life change, they shared a warm hug.
“And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” At first it is the two detectives against one liaison officer, but when all three join together, they are a force to be reckoned with.
Production Values
“” (1997) was well directed by Dwight H. Little. It was written by Wayne Beach and David Hodgin who waxed clever at times. It stars Wesley Snipes, Diane Lane, Dennis Miller, Alan Alda, Ronny Cox and Daniel Benzali. Snipes and Lane were great. The cast did a decent job.
MPAA rated it R for sexuality, violence and some language.
It had a TV drama feel to it with
Steven Bernstein's somewhat stifling cinematography,
yet mixed in with some primo angle shots. Its lively musical score
was by Christopher Young. The pace was relentless. It was filmed on
location in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Runtime is 1¾ hours.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
This movie grabs one's attention because so much is at stake and the correct resolution is iffy. It sure promotes teamwork though the team is off the books. Heroes get made here, and a sardonic ending leaves us feeling good regardless. The movie's higher power is a black guy, for what it's worth.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Edge of your seat action-packed. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Well done special effects. Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening. Suspense: Keeps you on the edge of your seat. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Print. Software.
Bork, Robert H. Slouching Towards Gomorrah. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Print.
Brimelow, Peter and Leslie Spencer. “When quotas replace merit, everybody suffers,” Forbes, February 15, 1993, p. 102. As quoted in Bork.
King Jr., Martin Luther. Letter From Birmingham Jail. 1963. Print.
bibles.n7nz.org