Mad City 

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Director: Constantin Costa-Gravas
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta

So it's like this: freshly-fired Sam Baily (John Travolta) walks into his old job with a gun, demanding to be taken seriously by his fiscally conscious museum curator boss (Blythe Danner). A group of schoolkids happen to be inside, as well as Max Brackett (Dustin Hoffman), an investigative reporter who has fallen from grace from the networks and landed himself at a small-time affiliate where he can't cause any trouble. Things escalate, Baily accidentally shoots a guard, and it turns into a 3-day hostage ordeal that brings in the heavy-hitters from both the FBI and the Mass Media.

Director Costa-Gravas (who brought us the wonderfully intense "Music Box") wants to imbue this flick with all the heavy-handed political philosophy that has adorned his other work abroad, but he seems too far from home here. Not only is the material obvious (the media is mean-spirited and destructive? duh!), but there seems to be a human cog in this churning gearshift that is missing. Travolta is endearing as the good-natured oaf with a low I.Q., but you wonder how the hell he has made it into adulthood being so clueless?

Hoffman's Brackett has all the qualitites of being a rich, contradictory tragic hero—but when it gets right down to it, we can't figure him out enough to empathize. Is he truly a cynical media hound, or is there something pitiable keeping him twisted? His feud with an unctuous star anchor (Alan Alda, a la Jack Nicholson in "Broadcast News") is fueled by an on-air tiff from a few years earlier, a plane crash story where Alda was being horrifyingly insensitive. Does this mean Brackett has always been a bit of a softie, or is he just schizophrenic? Even the movie's best element, a sense of heavy dreadful suspense that surrounds the hostage crisis, is blunted by too much emotional gravity in the film's final moments. Costa-Gravas' targets have always been worthy, but sometimes it's best to let us Americans kick ourselves.

With Mia Kirshner, Robert Prosky, William Atherton and Ted Levine.

—Ian Williams

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