The Package

(Andrew Davis, USA, 1989)

Frankly paranoid visions of the unknowable conspiracies underlying American political life have given rise to many terrific movies: John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979).

Although not in their league, The Package is an arresting, intelligent action-thriller by a talented director.

The problem for the central male of virtually every paranoid thriller is that, inexorably, he loses control of events: he sees, hears, knows and can act on very little.

The film itself then mimes this loss of focus, multiplying plot threads and reducing the hero to a bewildered ant. Brian De Palma is the undoubted master of this deliberately disorienting narrative form.

Gene Hackman plays the patsy here: Special Forces Master Sergeant Johnny Gallagher, the pawn in a neo-conservative assassination scheme to ensure that the globe’s superpowers never make peace with each other.

Unfortunately, the film switches, in its closing section, from tough-minded political fable to wish-fulfilling heroic fantasy.

MORE Davis: Holes, A Perfect Murder, The Fugitive

#a 1990s female paranoid thriller: The Pelican Brief

© Adrian Martin 1 October 1991