Saturday, November 28, 2020

There's a difference between a firing line and a line of fire

No, not Firing Line, but the thought of Groucho Marx and William F. Buckley together is intriguing

During one of the many free preview weekends, I had the chance to record In the Line of Fire. It's been on a bunch of times since then, but I never got around to watching it to do a review on it. With Thanksgiving being this week I had some free time to watch more movies, and noticed that In the Line of Fire would be on StarzEncore Suspense tonight at 9:00 PM and again tomorrow at 6:31 AM, so I finally watched it.

Clint Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent who does the sort of things they did back before it was in the Department of Homeland Security and in the Treasury Department. As you may recall from Mister 880, the Secret Service investigated counterfeiting, and that's what Frank's doing with his new partner Al D'Andrea (Dylan McDermott). They have a particularly difficult case that nearly gets Al shot, but they get their man.

Frank is close to retirement age, which is part of the reason he's moved to anti-counterfeiting from doing what most people think of when they think Secret Service, which is defending the President. Indeed, in one early scene when he's helping in the detail of a visiting foreign dignitary, he clearly no longer seems physically up to it. But there's also another reason why he's investigating counterfeiting these days.

Back in 1963, Frank was part of the security detail around then-President John F. Kennedy. Now, if you know your American history, you'll know that Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas in Novemberf 1963, something the damn Boomers won't let us forget. One of Frank's jobs would have been to take a bullet for the President, and Frank was supposedly just indecisive enough that day that the first bullet hit Kennedy (realistically, I don't think anybody could have stopped it).

Fully well aware of this is Mitch Leary (John Malkovich). Leary was trained by the CIA to be an assassin, but removed from the job for reasons. Leary is resentful and planning to assassinate the current president. But like a lot of movie villains, he's also incredibly arrogant, to the point that he starts calling up Frank and taunting Frank about Frank's previous failure and how he (Mitch) is going to get the current president, who's in the midst of a tight re-election campaign. Note that I'm not really giving anything away, since this is a suspense movie in the Hitchcock classification of showing the audience the bad guy/thing and then leaving the audience to wonder whether it will be thwarted.

For this reason, Frank wants to be reassigned to presidential protection, since he's one of the only people who can really take down this unknown caller: he doesn't know at first that Mitch is ex-CIA; his bosses only get an inkling of something awful when a fingerprint search reveals classified results. But other people involved in presidential protection, such as agent Watts (Gary Cole) and the President's Chief of Staff Harry Sargent (Fred Thompson) aren't so sure. On Frank's side are his boss Sam Campagna (John Mahoney), and eventually fellow agent and love interest Lilly Raines (Rene Russo).

Leary makes his preparations meticulously, rather reminiscent of Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal, while Frank and the other agents know that there's going to be an assassination attempt coming; they just don't know when or where considering how the President is criss-crossing the country on his re-election campaign.

In the Line of Fire mostly works, although I think you're going to have to spend a bit of disbelief about Mitch's arrogance, as well as Frank's physical state in a scene where he's running across rooftops chasing Mitch. The suspense is well handled, and there's a lot of action too. Overall, it's a fairly undemanding movie, but of course it's in a genre where you're not expecting anything demanding. So in that regard, it's absolutely worth a watch with a bowl of popcorn or whatever your favorite snack is. It's available on both DVD and Blu-ray.

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