A blizzard. A diner in a small Colorado town. A president in crisis. A finger poised over a button that will launch nuclear weapons.

That’s the setting for the political thriller Deterrence, a movie which no one saw when it breezed through theaters earlier this year. Now it’s out on video and DVD and it’s worth renting if:

a) You like fast-talking TV shows like The West Wing
b) You’re a fan of one-setting, multi-character plays like William Inge’s Bus Stop
c) That War Room scene in Dr. Strangelove really turned you on

Deterrence is not a dark comedy like Kubrick’s anti-war satire, but there are moments when an appearance by Peter Sellers’ President Merkin Muffley would not be too awfully surprising.

Instead, we get President Walt Emerson (hmm, sounds pretty close to a certain Transcendalist poet…), played by Kevin Pollack. As the former vice president, he stepped into the Oval Office job after the previous president died (the Gerald Ford syndrome). He’s a president that no one actually voted for. He’s been in charge for four months and now it’s the day of the 2008 presidential primaries. Things are not looking very good for poor Walt Emerson: his margin of victory is narrower than the hair plucked from the head of a Florida voter and more tenuous than a hanging chad.

Things are about to get worse.

For one thing, a snowstorm traps Emerson and his small staff in a small-town diner with the usual assortment of local yokels: a black cook, a Canadian waitress, a pool-cue-wielding redneck, a yuppie couple playing chess (just one of the symbols Deterrence wallops you over the head with)…you know, standard movie characters from the script-writer’s bag-o-tricks. Don’t worry about them too much, however—they’re just there for their prop value. As ordinary citizens—the “you” and “me” of the story—they aren’t given much to do except sit around and look in awe of the president, then start flinging hot-wired talk his way once he sets World War Three in motion.

While Emerson is still glad-handing the common people, advising them on chess moves and waiting for his blue-plate dinner special to be served, Iraq invades Kuwait and kills hundreds of UN peacekeepers, most of them Americans.

Fortunately, he’s got several satellite phones, high-speed laptop computers and that “football” briefcase handcuffed to the wrist of the young military officer—you know, the one with all the super-secret launch codes for the Bomb. What’s a weak-willed president to do?

For one thing, he can start spouting dialogue like this: “We need to make decisions instantaneously.”

In the blink of an eye, Emerson decides to threaten Iraq with nuclear weapons, promising to become the first president since Truman to drop the bomb. His chief of staff (Timothy Hutton) is aghast. The Garden of Eden, he points out, was in Iraq and Emerson should think about the consequences of "wiping out a civilization where civilization began."

Thus begins the nuclear stare-down contest which makes up the majority of Deterrence and throws the movie into a fever pitch of suspense with occasional bouts of stupidity thrown in to remind us that we are, after all, only watching a movie. For a thriller so dependent on plot, there are a few disturbingly deep plot holes and contrivances. Why the president is stuck in the diner is never satisfactorily explained. I don’t buy the reason that there’s "too much risk" for the military to swoop in with a helicopter and pluck him out of there. Too much risk of what? Do they really think a sniper will be sitting out in that blinding blizzard, waiting for a half-second clear shot at the chief executive’s head?

Then, at one point not too much later, Emerson and his two advisors step outside the diner, forsaking Secret Service protection, to discuss a plot contrivance we’re not privy to until the stunningly silly climax. This also sets up another plot twist which is even harder to swallow—while the president is out in the blizzard, a character inside the diner commits an act of violence which, astoundingly, the Secret Service couldn’t foresee.

But all of that insulting dialogue and eye-rolling contrivance falls by the wayside when Deterrence sticks to what it does best: building tension. In spite of it all, midway through the movie, my knuckles were whitening and my heart was thumping like a bongo drum as I watched Emerson bring the nation ever closer to annihilation. As he did in this fall’s The Contender, writer-director (and former movie critic) Rod Lurie knows how to keep the pace clipping right along. Dialogue (some of it actually smart and thought-provoking) bursts out like bullets from a machine gun. If you can keep up with the politispeak of TV’s The West Wing, nothing in this movie will deter you from its crackling exchanges.

Even though it was a contrivance, I also liked the fact that the entire action of this global nuclear warfare takes place entirely in the dining room of a greasy-spoon restaurant. The only time we see anything happening outside the diner is the newscasts (which show what looks like actual footage from the Gulf War). Lurie is obviously making us pay attention to how much we depend on the boob tube to deliver our information.

The acting is decent, for as much as the script allows. Pollack, Hutton and Sheryl Lee Ralph as the National Security Advisor seem up to the task of handling lines that sound like they were written by Tom Clancy then put through a Frank Capra filter.

Hutton: Are you really going to do this?
Pollack: I may not have a choice.
Hutton: You’re the President of the United States. You’ve got all the choice in the world.

There’s a good thriller here—it’s just too bad that, at times, Deterrence shares some of The Contender’s hysterical histrionics. And that’s not necessarily a good thing when your finger is poised over the A-bomb button. Some impatient viewers might just have their finger poised over the remote control’s rewind button.



Recommended: No