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Director Jonathan Demme adopts a mix of unrestricted and restricted narrative in the film to create illumination and suspense. The viewer's knowledge is unrestricted on the conspiracy behind the nomination of the presidential candidature and the personality inclination of Major Ben Marco (Danzel Washington) and Raymond Shaw (Live Schreiber) but is restricted on the tricks in which the protagonists provide a resolution to the conundrum. The unrestrictedness serves to establish some sort of illumination on the part of the viewer and eventually, when the restrictedness knowledge of the viewer is released, it creates a little surprise at the denouement of the film.

Thematically, the film casts a rebuke on the cleanliness of politics and certain governmental moves, rhetorically highlighting the multiplicity of manipulation and the existence of hidden agenda in politics. This is explicitly conveyed in the government agencies' (FBI / military personnel) garbling of Marco's image in the epilogue. However, the underlying ideology of the film is still a trust on the pure human dignity and personal integrity.

Yet Demme spends much excessive plot time on Marco's troop in Kuwait (1991) in the opening credits and relatively longer screen time on how he collects information to prove the existence of the conspiracy when he returns to the States, rendering the film a slow pace and less tense from its beginning to the middle. Marco fails to tightly couple the sequences to maintain perfect continuity and intensify suspense. The suspense is weak and not powerful enough in invoking a complex hypothesis formulating process on the part of the audience. It is only remedied in the last one thirds of the film under cross editing between the plot on Marco's hastened pursuance on the revelation of the conspiracy and that on Senator Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep)'s expedient assassination of Senator Thomas Jordan (Jon Voight) under relatively fast pacing.

Embracing genre elements of thriller, misery and sci-fi, the movie is only made at an average standard and it fails to fully exploit these elements in terms of visuals or narrative to satisfy the expectation of the audience. Washington looses charm to Streep in terms of staging. Streep is more attractive than the narrative, being able to maintain very good performance and fitting very well into the firm character of Eleanor Shaw.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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