Subtitles:

English (SDH), English , Danish , Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, none

Extras:

Most thrillers depend on chase scenes and shoot-outs. Some of best scenes in ``Absolute Power'' involve dialogue. The cop immediately fingers Luther Whitney as a possible suspect (he's one of ``only six guys alive'' who could have gotten into the mansion), and interviews him in a museum dining room. Eastwood, wearing half-glasses and a cloth cap that accentuate his age, smiles laconically and says, ``Go down a rope in the middle of the night? If I could do that, I'd be the star of my AARP meetings.'' There is another good scene between Ed Harris and old E. G. Marshall, who tells the policeman the two-way mirror was installed in the bedroom at his wife's suggestion: ``She thought I might have liked sitting there. I didn't.'' His is a poignant character, a self-made man who has spent his life giving money to charity, who has elected a president and who now fears ``I'll go out as the joke of the world.'' Eastwood delivers a few nice set pieces as the suspense builds, including a rendezvous with his daughter in a public plaza while two sets of gunmen train their sights on him. And we get hard-boiled dialogue in the Oval Office as the president and his merciless chief of staff run the coverup by ordering the Secret Servicemen to do things not covered in their job description (one is willing, one has qualms). Much depends on a hypocritical speech the president makes, which Luther sees at an airport bar just as he's about to flee the country. In a classic Eastwood moment, the thief's jaw hardens and he decides to stay and fight, rather than give a pass to a heartless liar.

Eastwood as director is usually eclipsed by Eastwood the actor; he has directed almost 20 films, good enough and successful enough to make him one of Hollywood's top filmmakers, and yet his stardom overshadows that role. Here he creates scenes of pure moviemaking--scenes without dialogue or violence, that work only because we know the characters and because the direction, camera work (by Jack N. Green) and editing (Joel Cox) put them together into suspenseful montages. The opening sequence is especially effective.

Gary Tooze

May 23rd, 2010