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The General's Daughter
USA/Germany 1999
Reviewed by John Wrathall
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Fort McCallum, the Deep South. When the naked corpse of Captain Elisabeth Campbell, daughter of General Joe Campbell, is discovered staked to the ground, Warrant Officer Paul Brenner of the Criminal Investigations Division has 36 hours to solve the case before the FBI is called in.
Brenner is teamed with his former girlfriend, army rape-counsellor Sarah Sunhill. Colonel Moore, Elisabeth's commander, is arrested when his fingerprints are found on the victim's dog tags. After Moore's apparent suicide, General Campbell's adjutant Colonel Fowler is anxious to pin the blame on Moore. But Brenner and Sunhill visit West Point, where they learn that Elisabeth, a few years back, was gang-raped on a training exercise, and left staked out on the ground. Her father persuaded her to hush the incident up.
From evidence provided by Colonel Moore's boyfriend, Brenner discovers that Elisabeth persuaded Moore to help her recreate the circumstances of her rape so that she could show her father what she had been through. But General Campbell, after discovering his daughter staked to the ground, decided to leave her there. Colonel Kent, who had an unrequited crush on Elisabeth, then killed her out of frustrated passion. Brenner races to the training ground to find that Kent has deliberately led Sunhill into a minefield. Brenner saves Sunhill before Kent kills himself by stepping on a mine. Instead of hushing up the case, Brenner threatens General Campbell with court martial for conspiracy to conceal a crime.
Review
With Con Air, director Simon West demonstrated that he could deliver a pyrotechnic action thriller in the classic Jerry Bruckheimer mould by keeping the camera constantly on the move and cutting every few seconds. He applies the same approach to The General's Daughter with rather less success, because this salacious whodunit requires very little action, but an endless parade of dialogue scenes in which assorted suspects tell the investigating duo what happened, cueing thunderous flashbacks.
In a desperate bid to pump up the action quotient (and provide material for a trailer) West throws in a succession of ridiculous climaxes, as bombastic as they are irrelevant to the plot. For starters, there's death by motorboat propeller. Later, the discovery of Colonel Moore's corpse is orchestrated, preposterously, to Carmina Burana, with baffling cut-aways to a fencing match in progress somewhere else on the base. Madeleine Stowe's role as Travolta's investigating sidekick, Sarah Sunhill, exists solely so that she can twice wander back to the crime scene at night, there to be assaulted by different suspects in the murder (though, since only one of them was actually guilty, what was the other one playing at?).
Worst of all, however, are the grotesque flashbacks to Elisabeth Campbell's rape on a training exercise at West Point, recounted in gloating slow-motion. West belongs to the school of directors who believe that everything in a film should look glossy and beautiful, even if the event depicted is itself abhorrent. He's a connoisseur of mist, low-angle tracking shots, helicopters and ejected cartridge cases cascading to the ground - but his ham-fisted deployment of these flashy clichés leaves one pining for the comparative subtlety of Tony Scott.
It's hard to see what else beyond money can have attracted John Travolta to the unrewarding role of Paul Brenner. In solving the murder, Brenner's sole act of detection is noticing a bin liner on a roof, an event which West, inevitably, tries to drum up into another action crescendo. The rest of the time, all Brenner is required to do is stare at suspects in that solid-jawed Travolta way until they tell him what they know, and launch us into another flashback. Brenner's character never develops, though he does mercifully drop his southern accent a few minutes into the film. His past relationship with Sunhill (who, as someone actually points out in the film, has no real function in the investigation: why does the victim need a rape counsellor if she's already dead?) is a bare-faced contrivance to give Brenner some substance.
The script is credited to Christopher Bertolini and William Goldman; the latter was presumably brought in for rewrites. Over the years, Goldman's two Oscars and his self-promoting handbook Adventures in the Screen Trade have given him an unassailable reputation as a script doctor; even now, nearly 30 years after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he's one of the few screenwriters whose name the general public recognises. But his shoddy work on The General's Daughter is only the latest entry in a recent catalogue of trash: Absolute Power, The Chamber and Maverick among others. Take the characterisation of the only halfway interesting person in the film, James Woods' Colonel Moore: he has a funny way of holding a cigarette, listens to opera and is seen cooking his dinner with undue fastidiousness. Of course, he turns out to be gay! Nothing in West's overblown bag of tricks could hope to disguise such a thoroughly by-the-numbers piece of writing.
Credits
- Producer
- Mace Neufeld
- Screenplay
- Christopher Bertolini
- William Goldman
- Based on the novel by
- Nelson DeMille
- Director of Photography
- Peter Menzies Jr
- Editor
- Glen Scantlebury
- Production Designer
- Dennis Washington
- Music
- Carter Burwell
- ©Paramount Pictures
- Production Companies
- Paramount Pictures presents a Mace Neufeld and Robert Rehme production
- A Jonathan D. Krane production
- In association with MFP Munich Film Partners GmbH & Co 1 Produktions KG
- Executive Producer
- Jonathan D. Krane
- Co-producer
- Stratton Leopold
- Associate Producers
- Lis Kern
- Anson Downes
- Linda Favila
- Production Supervisors
- Amy Ness
- Debbie Schwab
- Production Co-ordinator
- Robert Mazaraki
- Unit Production Manager
- Stratton Leopold
- Location Managers
- David Israel
- Lisa Strout
- Savannah Unit:
- Laura Bryant
- Assistant Directors
- Steve Danton
- Donald L. Sparks
- Foongy Lee
- Script Supervisor
- Patti Dalzell
- Casting
- Mindy Marin
- Voice:
- Barbara Harris
- Additional Photography
- Joe Maxwell
- Wescam Operator
- Steve Koster
- Camera Operators
- Robert Presley
- Joe Maxwell
- Richard Cantu
- Underwater:
- Mike Thomas
- Steadicam Operator
- Robert Presley
- Visual Effects Supervisor
- Glenn Neufeld
- Digital Visual Effects
- Visionart, Inc
- Digital Effects Supervisor:
- Marc Kolbe
- Digital Effects Producer:
- Robert D. Crotty
- Compositing Supervisor:
- Dorene Haver
- Digital Artists:
- Carl Hooper
- Jeremy Squires
- Jon-Marc Kortsch
- Daniel Patrick Naulin
- John Peel
- Chris 'Willie' Williams
- Dennis Bredow
- Jim McLean
- Archie Gogoladze
- Jeremy Nelligan
- Compositors:
- Alette Vernon
- Shellaine Corwel
- Christina Drahos
- Video I/O Supervisor:
- John Campuzano
- Film I/O Supervisors:
- Jeff Pierce
- Celine Jackson
- System Administrator:
- Krystal Wood
- Special Effects
- Co-ordinators:
- George Paine
- Chuck Stewart
- Paul Lombardi
- Technicians:
- Steven L. Dearth
- Scott Blackwell
- Terry Erickson
- Parry Willard
- Stan Bielowicz
- Shop Co-ordinator:
- Scott Mattson
- Additional Editing
- Todd Miller
- Art Directors
- Tom Taylor
- Ann Harris
- Set Designers
- Lorrie Campbell
- Lynn Christopher
- Beverli Eagen
- Set Decorator
- Marvin March
- Storyboard Artist
- David Negron Jr
- Costume Designer
- Erica Edell Phillips
- Costume Supervisors
- Mark Peterson
- Donna Marcione
- Make-up
- Supervisor:
- Toni G
- Artist:
- Will Huff
- Savannah Unit Artist:
- Joseph Hurt
- Dummy Corpse
- Steve Johnson's XFX Group
- Production Manager:
- Sean Taylor
- Project Supervisor:
- Christien Tinsley
- Mold Shop Supervisor:
- Matt Singer
- Cosmetics:
- Lennie MacDonald
- Hair Department Supervisor:
- Mark Boley
- Mold Technician:
- Brian Van Dorn
- Supervising Hairstylist
- Joy Zapata-Chavez
- Hairstylist
- Geordie Sheffer
- Title Design
- Imaginary Forces
- Titles/Opticals
- Pacific Title/Mirage
- Music Conductor/Orchestrations
- Sonny Kompanek
- Folk Music Recordings Adapter
- Greg Hale Jones
- Music Editors
- Adam Smalley
- Jim Henrikson
- Preview:
- Joe E. Rand
- Barbara McDermott
- Music Recorder/Mixer
- Michael Farrow
- Music Recordist
- Paul Wertheimer
- Music Technical Engineer
- Norm Dlugatch
- Soundtrack
- "Sea Lion Woman" (trad) performed by Christine Shipp, Katherine Shipp; "Lead Me to the Rock" (trad) performed by Wash Dennis, Charlie Sims; "Rock Island Line" (trad) performed by Kelly Pace and Group; "Say You're Mine" by Stephen Preston, performed by The Rockats; "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes; "Love You Anyway" by Barry A. Ryan, performed by The Rockats; "All through the Night" performed by Ray Colcord; "Downstairs" by Elvin Ray Jones, performed by Kenny Burrell; "In diesen heil'gen Hallen" from "Die Zauberflöte" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by Falloni Orchestra, soloist: Kurt Rydl, conducted by Michael Halász; "O Fortuna" from "Carmina Burana" by Carl Orff, performed by CSR Symphony Orchestra and Slovak Philharmonic Chorus, conducted by Stephen Gunzenhauser; "Amazing Grace" (trad), lyric by John Newton; "Early in the Mornin'"
- Sound Design
- Stephen Hunter Flick
- Sound Mixers
- Tommy Causey
- Steve Maslow
- Gregg Landaker
- Supervising Sound Editors
- Stephen Hunter Flick
- Co:
- Beth Sterner
- Supervising Dialogue Editor
- Carin Rogers
- Dialogue Editors
- Susan Kurtz
- Richard G. Corwin
- J.H. Arrufat
- Sound Effects Editors
- William Jacobs
- Peter Brown
- Jeff Clark
- ADR
- Recordist:
- Dave McDonald
- Mixer:
- Bob Baron
- Supervising Editor:
- Robert Ulrich
- Editor:
- Kerry Dean Williams
- Foley
- Artists:
- Sarah Monat
- Robin Harlan
- Mixer:
- Randy K. Singer
- Supervising Editor:
- Thomas Small
- Editors:
- Tammy Fearing
- Dana Gustafson
- Scott Curtis
- Jeff Payne
- Aerial Co-ordinator
- Craig Hosking
- Military Adviser
- Jared Chandler
- Forensic Specialist
- Gia Goyen
- 24 FPS Video Playback/Computer Graphics
- Playback Technologies
- Marine Co-ordinator
- Savannah Unit:
- Harris Parker
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Mark Riccardi
- Cast
- John Travolta
- Paul Brenner
- Madeleine Stowe
- Sarah Sunhill
- James Cromwell
- General Joe Campbell
- Timothy Hutton
- Colonel Kent
- Clarence Williams iii
- Colonel Fowler
- James Woods
- Colonel Moore
- Leslie Stefanson
- Elisabeth Campbell
- Daniel von Bargen
- Chief Yardley
- Peter Weireter
- Belling
- Mark Boone Junior
- Elkins
- John Beasley
- Colonel Slesinger
- Boyd Kestner
- Captain Elby
- Brad Beyer
- Bransford
- John Benjamin Hickey
- Captain Goodson
- Rick Dial
- Cal Seiver
- Ariyan Johnson
- PFC Robbins
- John Frankenheimer
- General Sonnenberg
- Katrina vanden Heuvel
- CNN anchor
- Chris Snyder
- Deputy Yardley
- Steve Danton
- Rich Jackson
- bomb van soldiers
- Joshua Stafford
- Darius Montgomery
- soldiers who finds Elizabeth
- Scott Rosenberg
- Jared Chandler
- James Paul Morse
- Paul Ware
- MP guards
- Mark Ivie
- fencing loser
- Michael Terry Swiney
- lockup sergeant
- Tait Ruppert
- young tech
- Lisa A. Tripp
- work detail leader
- James O. Evans
- Chris Grayson
- Sy Leopold
- Fred Tate
- sex video officers
- Steve Goyen
- honor guard commander
- Pablo Espinosa
- colour guard commander
- Levin Handy Jr
- Jason M. Luevano
- airborne soldiers
- Gustavo A. Perdomo
- drill team NCO
- Rodney Mitchell
- Ryan D. Kirkland
- ranger instructors
- Michael Gerald Jones Jr
- soldier in locker room
- Matt Anderson
- firing party commander
- Cooper Huckabee
- Colonel Weems
- Cliff Fleming
- Cris Saunders
- Bruce Benson
- Rick Shuster
- Corey Fleming
- pilots
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- United International Pictures (UK) Ltd
- 10, 480 feet
- 116 minutes 27 seconds
- Digital DTS Sound/Dolby Digital
- Colour by
- DeLuxe
- Anamorphic [Panavision]