Word: script
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...script like this should be a push-over for any cast. Just spit it out and you can't go wrong. But this cast seems unable to do just that. They're slow on their cues and in their delivery. Attempting to read meaning into lines that don't have any is a trying exercise for cast and audience alike. Mamet's quips must rattle out like an artillery barrage, not like languid dinnertime conversation...
...waggish moments, Henry Kissinger once commented, "There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full." Clinton, along with society in America and the West at large, seems to take this attitude in earnest. Last May, when Bosnian Serbs refused to follow his peace script, Clinton lamented with almost pathetic candor, "I felt really badly because I don't want to have to spend any more time on that than is absolutely necessary, because what I got elected to do was to let America look at our own problems." When the brutality of a local khan like Somalia...
...decadent West in general and the U.S. in particular. The conclusion was strictly business. The last batch of hostages was traded for some of the Great Satan's slickest weapons, inventoried by U.S. Lieut. Colonel Oliver North and routed to Iran through Israel with Ronald Reagan still reading the script: "No arms for hostages...
...people do in films produced by Joel Silver, he of the Die Hards and the Lethal Weapons -- i.e., frequently, spectacularly, preposterously. Stallone and Snipes both play this nonsense tongue-in-cheekily. Sandra Bullock has an attractive naivete as a scholarly policewoman who hangs out with Sly. But ultimately the script's often sharp social satire is drowned out by the noise and confusion. It is also undercut by casting virtually all the psychopathically murderous criminals as minority-group members. A little political correctness in that matter would have prevented this movie from playing right into the dismissive hands...
Astin's supporting cast performs decently, but unfortunately the script limits their roles as well. Ned Beatty portrays Rudy's blue-collar Irish father convincingly, but he appears only early in the movie. Charles S. Dutton, as the groundskeeper of the Notre Dame stadium, replaces Beatty in the role of Rudy's mentor. Dutton, who tends to over-act (as anyone who has seen him as "Roc" on TV knows), somewhat overdoes his part of the wise old man who has to give sage and timely advice in order to motivate young Rudy...