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| Twentieth Century Fox | Release Date: January 31, 1986 |
Starring:
Beatrice Straight, Denzel Washington, E.G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver, Gene Hackman, J.T. Walsh, Julie Christie, Kate Capshaw, Michael Learned, Richard Gere
Summary:
After a close friend drops out of politics, a political consultant helping to find a replacement finds a web of corruption and deceit as well.
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The diverse elements of the plot are fairly complicated, but Lumet is a strong director who knows how to effectively weave these components together. Gere, in one of his better performances, is the all-important connecting factor. The secondary roles are well cast, with Washington and Learned giving the most assured characterizations.
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Power is cast exceedingly well, with director Lumet being one of the best-connected directors in New York. Power gives us the likes of Gene Hackman, Julie Christie, E.G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver and Beatrice Straight in supporting roles! [31 Jan 1986, p.30N]
The action is fast and involving until the three-quarter mark, when the David Himmelstein screenplay loses its focus and everything muddies up. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]
Power fails, not because it is badly done; Lumet and an exceptional cast do their best to bring it to life. But they are ultimately defeated by an overplotted script that offers few surprises and no real revelations about today's politics. [17 Feb 1986]
Not so much about power as about p.r., this facile treatment of big-time politics and media, featuring Richard Gere as an amoral imagemaker, revolves around the unstartling premise that modern politicians and their campaigns are calculatedly packaged for TV. In spite of relentless jet-propelled location hopping that helps to stave off boredom, Power never gets airborne.
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Ideas and issues in this film are as scarce as hen's teeth. In their place are little signposts that tell us what we are supposed to believe without thinking...Power is a well-meaning, witless, insufferably smug movie that -if it does anything at all, and I'm not sure it does - anesthetizes legitimate outrage at some of the things going on in our society.
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Full of intriguing possibilities, it is a film propelled by a puff of hot air, not a tornado of brilliantly realized political, philosophical and artistic ideas. Sometimes, it is so embarrassingly bad that one can only laugh and wonder how Lumet could have missed the windmill by so much more than a mile. [31 Jan 1986, p.D9]
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