DETERRENCE

Former Los Angeles movie critic Rod Lurie has quit that biz to write and direct movies. The first of his stories to make the big screen is a political thriller starring Kevin Pollak, DETERRENCE. Though his first movie is not awful, it seems clear that Mr. Lurie should have set his sights on something less ambitious.

In the movie, set in the year 2008, Pollak plays America’s first Jewish president, Walter Emerson. In a cryptic inside joke, viewers learn that Vice President Buchanan (say it ain’t so, Pat!) had to resign for some reason and that the recently deceased elected president appointed Emerson as the new Vice President. Emerson has been president for only four months, the movie also tells viewers, and is currently engaged in an election campaign. Endangering his campaign is a confrontation with North Korea and China in Southeast Asia, where Emerson has massed nearly the entire U.S. fleet.

On the campaign trail, Emerson and his top aides, including (unbelievably) his National Security Advisor, are snowed in at a diner in Colorado, just miles away from the NORAD defense complex in that state. They’re all excited about some positive campaign results when the TV news anchor reads an urgent news report that the late Saddam Hussein’s son has just invaded Kuwait, with Iraqi troops now headed for the oilfields of Saudi Arabia. Emerson threatens to nuke Baghdad if they don’t retreat and if the son doesn’t surrender to United Nations forces for arrest. Making this tinderbox situation even more volatile is the fact that Iraq has its own weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons are ready to launch if the American plane carrying its nukes crosses the Iraqi border.

Although Pollak, Hutton and writer/director Lurie handle the basic drama of this international crisis well, parts of the story are confusing or not explained clearly. Also, some of the other situations and characters in the diner are corny and pretentious. For instance, Sean Astin (RUDY) plays a redneck-type character who shoots pool in the diner and reveals some racist attitudes in a corny, politically-correct way. Also, although the movie ultimately seems to side with the president’s surprising, unique and moral resolution of the crisis, it reveals, in another pretentious, gratuitous moment, that the president actually considers himself to be an atheist. Although the president’s atheism doesn’t appear to directly affect the decisions he makes in the story, one can’t help but wonder whether it did not affect his decision to drop the bomb. Of course, considering what the staff of MOVIEGUIDE® knows of the content in Mr. Lurie’s work as a former movie critic, he’s probably an atheist also. Contrary to what many atheists and other secularists believe, MOVIEGUIDE® itself believes that politics and God should be mixed together, especially when it comes to decisions about morality, the family, civil society, crime, and warfare.

DETERRENCE deserves a strong caution, however, for its use of strong foul language, not for its questionable, vague religious viewpoint. Though Mr. Lurie’s work needs improvement, he still provides an interesting, sometimes provocative exercise in international politics and nuclear warfare.