When the United States military captures the leader of a terrorist group, it sparks a wave of terrorism in retaliation – notably against New York City. They send in Anthony ‘Hub’ Hubbard (Denzel Washington), the head of the FBI’s counter-intelligence task force, to try and find the source of the terrorist cells and stop the bombings before something more serious happens.
He’s teamed up with CIA agent Elise Kraft (Annette Bening) – a move that doesn’t make either of them particularly happy.
When they don’t seem to be making any progress, and the threat worsens, martial law is declared in Manhattan, and the authorities send in Major General William Devereaux (Bruce Willis), who has no concern for anyone. His job is simply to halt the terrorism with any means at his disposal, and this includes rounding up anyone of Arab descent and placing them into prisoner-of-war camps. As you may imagine, this doesn’t help matters.
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Posted to
Drama on March 19th, 2006 by Chad Everett
The acting in this drama was superb, especially from Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn. I find that as I watch more and more of Tim Robbins, I find that he has his characters nailed (he won an Oscar for his performance here) but they just don’t vary a whole lot. They always have the same off-kilter look, and they each make you wonder what is going on underneath the surface, but there just isn’t a lot of real depth. While I’m not the world’s largest fan of Sean Penn, I was impressed by his role here (he won too, deservedly so).
The thug-like character played by Penn is matched by Bacon’s police persona, and wouldn’t you know it? They knew each other as kids. As it turns out, Tim Robbins rounds at the trio as one of the friends who was abducted and abused one fine day while they were in the middle of some mischief making.
Penn’s character, Jimmy Markum, finds that his daughter is missing, and then that she is dead. Meanwhile, Bacon’s detective, Sean Devine claims the job of trying to figure out who did it – or at least find a reasonable suspect – before Markum uses his contacts to bring someone to justice.
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