Absolute Power

Clint Eastwood has done it again. He’s produced this time a surprisingly interesting suspense drama in which the US president (Gene Hackman) is depicted as the literal villain. It’s also in some ways pretty inventive that the president is depicted here by the already pudgy Hackman.

The story goes like this: Eastwood here plays a professional cat burglar who breaks into a government owned mansion in the District of Columbia, where he witnesses, while in hiding, what turns from an incident of rape into a murder. And as we subsequently learn, as mentioned, the culprit (Hackman) turns out to be president, and the shooters his security agents!

And the victim herself it seems, is the young wife of an old friend of Hackman’s, played here by E.G Marshall. The film then shows how the the crime conspirators then start trying to get rid of the evidence and make it look as if a burglar, in this case, Eastwood, had murdered her. But they forget a crucial piece of evidence, the letter opener with which the young woman had managed to overpower and injure him, and Eastwood nicks that and escapes with it.

The rest of the film deals with how this all becomes a hunter-and-hunted either way story. The evil agents try to do in Eastwood and even his character’s long estranged daughter, and he in turn lashes back at them through some very sneaky methods.

The acting and even directing by Eastwood himself is tour-de-force, and it’s quite a good suspense story to check out. This too will come as one of Eastwood’s best movies as both actor and director.