Flak Magazine: Review of The General's Daughter, 6-17-99

Too gun-shy to duck into some seamy sex shop for a little rape porn? Allow me to recommend The General's Daughter. Leslie Stefanson is the young and beautiful title character, and when she's not tied spread-eagled to tent stakes, lying dead, or being raped and quasi-raped, she's as likely as not appearing in grainy S&M videos.

I know, I know; because it's a major studio film, you'd expect a lot of shadows and allusion, not actual footage of creamy-skinned women being methodically (and repeatedly) stripped naked and strangled with their own panties – but you'd be wrong.

If that doesn't sound like entertainment to you – and it had better not – then keep your distance from The General's Daughter. I don't want to be accused of misleading anyone or misrepresenting the film, so it should be stated out front that the film doesn't glamorize rape...at least, not exactly. Rather, the film glamorizes everything, its lens having been dipped into syrup that's hardened into a thin candy coating.

There couldn't be a more wrong handling for a film that, at least on paper, is peripherally about the dangers of not reporting rape; of all my friends, I'll warn off those with sexual trauma in their past most strongly.

Note: Although I have a thing about movie journalism that lets slip even the most "insignificant" plot points, I'm going to let all fly with this one. If you just must see this film, skip the rest of this or the movie is going to be even less enjoyable, although I'm not sure that's possible.

Taken from Nelson DeMille's novel that, judging from Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman's adaptation, must be the plainest kind of potboiler, the film follows Paul Brenner (John Travolta), a CID investigator who's been brought to Ft. McCollum by his old friend Colonel Kent (Timothy Hutton) to ensnare an illegal arms mover. Seconds after braining said mover on a motorboat propeller, Brenner gets called in when Elisabeth Campbell (Stefanson) is found dead on the base. With the assistance of rape counselor Sarah Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe), a former paramour of his who just happens to be on the crime scene, Brenner not only uncovers Elisabeth's kinky sex chamber but also her gang rape seven years previous at West Point.

Putting the pieces together, Brenner determines that although it was in fact Elisabeth's gay mentor Colonel Moore (James Woods) who tied her up the night of her death, that was all in an attempt to bring to a head Elisabeth's ongoing confrontation with her father, decorated General Campbell (James Cromwell). Campbell, it should be noted, urged her to conceal her earlier rape for the good of all of their careers, the Armed Services in general and women in the Service in particular. The general arrives, they bicker, he leaves and his yes-man Colonel Foster (Clarence Williams III) shows up. The next morning, Elisabeth is dead.

But wait, there's more. In the first of three climaxes, Brenner, Campbell and Foster have their stand-off–and it is revealed for the first time that Elisabeth was dead when Foster arrived. Campbell thought Foster killed her out of loyalty; Foster, being loyal, thought he was covering up Campbell's misdeed. But then whodunnit? Well, who else but the same character that's always the perpetrator in these second-rate mysteries: the protagonist's old friend, portrayed here by Hutton. Who kills himself with a Bouncing Betty during the second climax, during which it starts to rain. Which is followed by the third climax, in which Travolta angrily declares to General Campbell that he killed his daughter seven years ago in telling her to cover up the rape. Which all transpires seconds before the 21-gun salute honoring Elisabeth's death.

I'm entirely serious.

The only real mystery here is how this convoluted mess, part second-rate TV drama and third-rate Greek tragedy, could end up more formulaic than the Pythagorean theorem. There are no surprises; you know from the set-up that Woods didn't do it, just like you know from a lot of unmotivated cutaways and asides throughout the movie that Hutton did, just like you know from the title that the general was totally complicit in the crime.

There's a lot of blame to be placed here. First, on Paramount Pictures for loosing this turkey on America. Paramount has had a tough time of it recently, due in part to Daughter producer Mace Neufeld, whose high-potential projects for the studio like Beverly Hills Cop III and The Saint have been the hoariest duds.

Second is to screenwriter Goldman, a Hollywood veteran of great and deserved repute, for accepting this script doctoring job, without which the film certainly wouldn't have been made. The script he doctored is by first-timer Bertolini, and you can feel Goldman's presence in all the good lines and fine speeches as surely as you can sense his absence in the cottonheaded plotting.

But Goldman's real reason for being hired appears to be so he could rewrite Woods' Colonel Moore into Vicini, Wallace Shawn's brilliant Sicilian from Goldman's The Princess Bride. (I remain entirely serious.) Here we are in an ostensibly heavy film, and Travolta and Woods are exchanging meta-intellectual deconstructive zingers somewhere between Mamet and Stillman. The dialogue is cute and all, but it's for an entirely different movie.

But the movie's insurmountable problem, no doubt in my mind, is director Simon West, making his sophomore feature here. His previous film was the totally heartless Con Air, to which he graduated after succeeding with – I'm still entirely serious – the Budweiser Frogs. He went from those CGI amphibians to directing a Jerry Bruckheimer cartoon starring Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and John Malkovich, and now he's been saddled with a rape-centered "whydunnit" (his term).

The film is a marvel of ineptitude, with fight scenes (like that motorboat beaut) that you can't follow and that make no sense, to the most distracting instances of lack of continuity in years, to scene after scene of racheted-up-to-the-nines suspense and sentiment, which are respectively ineffective and false.

Just when I thought the movie couldn't get worse, it faded out to very solemn title cards about how important women are to the military. Veritably outraged by its presumptuousness now and sure it couldn't get any worse, the film fades back in so we can watch Madeleine Stowe look on admiringly as Travolta drives off base.

I do not recommend this movie.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)