There is an inherent problem in employing an anonymous actor (one Jim Curley) to play the President of the United States and having Clint Eastwood play his bodyguard. It is not Mr Curley's fault, but in shots in which he stands acknowledging the applause of enormous flag-waving crowds, you can't help feeling that the thousands of extras are looking right past him and screaming "Cli-i-i-i-i-nt! Make our Day!" And if someone suddenly surged forward with a gun it wouldn't be to take a pot shot at President Curley but to ask his secret service agent to sign the barrel.
With a face that is beginning to look like it was carved out of the granite of Mount Rushmore, Clint is the man who really should be president: a tall, handsome, laconic, all-American liberal who speaks softly and carries a big gun. If any one person could resemble America's image of itself, Clint is it. He spent a few years in the wilderness but that's not such a bad place for a cowboy. Last year he came back to reclaim what was rightfully his with the dark, vengeful, self-directed western Unforgiven.
If, in the wake of the beating of Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots, that film somehow captured the uncertainty that pervaded America and highlighted its ambivalent relationship with its own history and, in particular, the constitutional right to bear arms, In The Line Of Fire brushes aside those doubts to re-establish the notion of America, land of the brave and the free (and the odd, but entirely necessary, murderous psychotic maniac). It is almost an homage to Clint and, by reflection, an homage to America.
In an unintentionally amusing flashback that employs the latest technical jiggery pokery, images of a younger Clint (circa Dirty Harry) appear in historical footage standing next to JFK. It is easy to imagine that this is just another example of the star-struck president swanning it up with his Hollywood contemporaries, but Clint is, of course, supposed to be a humble bodyguard. Clint is haunted by the fact that he had not saved JFK on that fatal day in Dallas, which, as a personal nightmare, is a marked improvement over Kevin Costner's The Bodyguard, who could not forgive himself for his failure to stop the shooting of Ronald Reagan.
Shedding what might be his first screen tear, Clint speculates how history might have been changed if he had reacted fast enough to take a bullet for the Pres (for one thing, we would have been spared several hours of Oliver Stone's paranoid conspiracy theories). The pre-assassination days of JFK and his Camelot court represent the last moments of political innocence for America, before the ground was muddied by Vietnam and Watergate. Through the murderous intentions of a rogue CIA agent (John Malkovich, hamming it up as the very essence of paranoid conspiracy theory in action), Clint is given another chance to save his President and, by implication, America.
Which is reading a lot into what is essentially a smart and pacey thriller. If In The Line Of Fire is a tale of redemption on an epic scale it is also a dedicatedly commercial piece of entertainment, rarely straying beyond predictable confines but dressing up the clichés with gloss, wit and star power. Clint's ageing secret service man must overcome inner demons but these hardly pervade the movie, which is brash and bright, flying the American flag at every opportunity and leaving little room to doubt that good will triumph over evil.
The film-makers received the unprecedented co-operation of the Secret Service, with an opportunity to recreate their actual offices and with on-set advisers making sure correct procedures were followed. This is hardly surprising: in its own way In The Line Of Fire is as gung ho as Top Gun. Clint Eastwood is exactly the man every secret service agent must imagine himself to be.
It is, curiously, Eastwood's performance, warmly human and dryly self-deprecatory that takes the potentially unpleasant edge off what could have been a self-congratulatory paen to the boys in black. If Eastwood really does stand for America then there must be hope for that nation, for Dirty Harry appears to have become a New Man, with a taste for jazz and a sensitivity to women's needs.
The woman in question is Renne Russo, fresh from comparing scars with Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon III and making a bid for typecasting as a gun toting Secret Service, uh, person. Just exactly where the gun she totes is concealed on her tightfitting dresses is another question. For all the film's trumpeted accuracy it remains hard to imagine a top agent leaping to the President's defence in a full length evening dress and six-inch high heels.
But somehow such palpable nonsense only adds to the fun to be had here. Director Wolfgang Petersen handles the action with refreshing clarity, keeping up the tension with smart editing and never allowing the set-pieces to overwhelm the characters. This is a far more polished affair than any of Eastwood's own directorial efforts, disguising its lack of depth with an excess of gloss.
John Malkovich may be slumming it as a psycho, but he appears to be having immense fun killing everyone in sight (which, I suppose, he rarely gets to do in his usual serious dramas) and Eastwood has rarely given as relaxed and well-rounded a portrayal. He seems to be enjoying his new lease of life, even if it means contradicting the very essence of the film that brought him back.
If Unforgiven undermined the American way, In The Line Of Fire redresses the heroic balance, giving us a neatly packaged homily to truth, justice and big, big guns.
RATING: * * * * *