“It never happened.” The most heinous words in the vocabulary of the powerful male casts a sharp contemporary light in the wake of MeToo and other scandals on the litany of personal and institutional abuse inflicted on woman. Speak up and careers will be ruined, institutions will be permanently damaged. Keep quiet and you’ll receive quiet reward, promotion maybe, a better job, some cash, all coming with the restrictions of an NDA, perhaps guilt and a guarantee that truth will remain hidden and perpetrators go free.
In today’s society this carries far more emotional firepower than it did back in the day when the outcome was viewed as a typical twist in a better-than-average crime tale driven by an unexpectedly powerful performance by John Travolta, then in his prime.
It’s multiple rape and carried out in the most horrific manner, the victim staked out, the faces of the rapists concealed by camouflage and masks in a military exercise. And as always, it’s not about unsated lust, but power, the need of the male to bring down a rising female star cadet, general’s daughter Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) whose talent is putting them in the shade.
That’s the discovery but it’s not the mystery. The mystery is why would this act be repeated a decade later, apparently as a voluntary act, as if the woman is so humiliated and has lost all her self-worth that she inflicts this act upon herself. It’s a single rape this time, but she’s still staked out, spreadeagled, and it’s on a spare piece of ground in a military barracks. But it’s the last time she’ll suffer in this particular fashion because she’s been murdered.
“Soldier first, cop second.” That’s the dilemma facing army detective Paul Brenner (John Travolta). Even though he’s revealed from the outset as a not-to-be-messed-with cop, that might work when he’s arresting minor criminals, but it’s going to be sorely tested when he’s confronted by the might of the U.S. Army which has already successfully buried the first crime.
Brenner teams up with ex-girlfriend rape specialist Sara Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe) and after some initial snippy conflict they soon work together as an effective team with flirting back on the agenda and Sara proving herself capable of the kind of deceit that clever cops require to snare suspects.
There’s almost a roll-call of suspects because Elisabeth, now a captain in Psych-Ops, has left open to blackmail a whole bunch of married men after having sex with them. Her promiscuity can’t be called out because that would reflect badly on her father, about-to-retire war hero General Campbell (James Cromwell), base commander at Fort McCallum. But she is so indiscriminate in her choice of lovers that it appears like a campaign of psychological warfare against her father, who was stationed in Germany at the time of the initial rape.
So among those investigated are Col Kent (Timorthy Hutton), Col Moore (James Woods), Capt Ekby (Boyd Kestner) and the local police chief’s son. The general’s adjutant Col Fowler (Clarence Williams III) behaves in a threatening manner.
So while this follows some of the rules of the genre and invents others, with missing evidence, attacks on the investigators, charm and brute force part of Brenner’s make-up, as well as inveterate stubbornness, the core is an examination of power. Brenner is subjected to the same threat, maintaining a code of omerta for the good of the institution and its apparently good reputation in the area of female recruits.
Apart from the rapists who get off scot-free, the only other person to benefit from the horrific rape is the general, who receives a promotion for convincing his daughter that she imagined it. The general witnesses the second stake-out. That’s its whole point, to show him what she went through and to get him to admit he let her down. But he turns his back, leaving her staked out naked so someone else can come along, rape her and shut her up for good.
The implications of this are so venomous that you can hardly believe it except you know full well that running parallel to an ongoing epidemic of rape and abuse is an ongoing epidemic of cover-up. “You can’t handle the truth” was never more baldly stated.
This doesn’t belong to the pantheon of great pictures due to the direction or acting, though that is more than solid on both counts, but because it reveals in brutal unsparing detail the impact of the crime upon the victim and the tendency for an institution to cover-up illegal act in order to protect itself and its personnel.
We are all more aware these days that rape is a weapon against women and hasn’t gone away although powerful figures – Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, for example – are being indicted. The crime used to be seen as the act of an individual working alone but now we know that in many instances the perpetrators can’t get away with it unless other powerful people are turning a blind eye.
The scene where General Campbell, visiting his daughter in hospital, seeing her battered and bloodied and in emotional hell, and telling her effectively to turn the other cheek makes your blood run cold.
John Travolta, back on track following some lean years before pitching up in Pulp Fiction (1995), is excellent as is Madeleine Stowe (Bad Girls, 1994) while James Woods (Any Given Sunday, 1999) offers one of his better characterizations. When Leslie Stefanson (Unbreakable, 2000) calls out, “Daddy,” it’ll break your heart.
But for all the wrong reasons the picture belongs to James Cromwell. You’ll never forget this contemptible father.
Directed by Simon West (The Mechanic, 2011) from a screenplay by William Goldman (Harper, 1966) and Christopher Bertolini (Battle Los Angeles, 2011) from the Nelson DeMille bestseller.
I can’t get this out of my mind. Netflix has it.
The Magnificent 60s 