Review of General`s Daughter, The

Introduction

Yet another militaristic thriller that fails to get off the ground. Fat, bored John Travolta plays Paul Brenner, a grizzled, frankly useless CID agent with, yes you guessed it has a ‘chip on his shoulder’ and also, rather conveniently, a ‘sassy’ female sidekick: rape investigator Madeleine Stowe whose investigative skills are significantly more acute than Travolta’s wise-cracking lard-arse. Travolta and Stowe are called in to investigate the murder of a female military officer, the titular daughter. However, it seems that she wasn’t exactly daddy’s sweetheart: indulging in a penchant for a spot of kinky sex after-hours and not being entirely undeserving of having been murdered in the first place.

Video

A good anamorphic transfer for this Paramount release (who are generating a pretty bad reputation in this regard.) Crisp, if slightly flaky (and certainly too dark) images and no obvious glitches.

Audio

Dolby 5.1, in English and German, plus 2.0 in Czech and Hungarian. Clear quality, particularly successful in highlighting the brilliant Carter Burwell’s atmospheric score.

Features

A fair complement of extras here: 2 trailers, one of those rubbish making-of featurettes (complete with over-emphasizing voice-over-man), some deleted scenes, including a more romantic alternative ending that resolves the relationship between Stowe and Travolta’s characters. Top it all off with a rather excruciating monotone commentary from director Simon West who is clearly reading verbatim from a list of bullet-points. Irritating.

Conclusion

Director West (‘Con Air’) manages to construct something vaguely extraordinary here: by some miracle of time constriction, he crams every cliché in the book into one 2 hour movie. This constitution may be remarkable, but it’s the only dimension of the film that is. This contrived and assuredly stupid movie is an old-fashioned whodunit, and like all bad whodunits, you know exactly whodunit after said psycho has had about a minute’s screen time (and no, I’m not going to spoil it for you, if you even care you deserve to have to sit through this movie.) So, a useless, plodding script (amazingly baring the name of legendary script maestro William Goldman), a cast who either look as if they’ve wandered off the set of another movie or simply wish they had: Cromwell redoes the patriarchal mentor thing from ‘LA Confidential’ but manages, predictably, to be completely unconvincing as an American Army officer. West’s insistence on staging the daughter’s rape in staccato MTV style opens him up, well and truly, to accusations of sensationalist exploitation. A matter which he himself facilitates by perpetuating the recurring montage of fetishistic sexual assault for the second half of the movie.

James Woods, as a laconic psychiatrist and sage to the deceased, is as good as ever (someone give this man a decent role!), but his presence is too short-lived to ease the strain on this lumbering, inept and frustratingly half-baked thriller. West’s attempts to inject an emotional dimension is aloof and ill-timed in a film as predictably aimless as ‘The General’s Daughter’. In fact, the most fun to be had is timing every thrill, revelation and menial plot-twist with a stop watch.